Thursday, April 24, 2008

When Disruption Isn't Bad

Those who have not heard the term disruptive technology may be forgiven for their assumption that this is a negative term and, for some industries unable to adapt to new realities, it can be.  However, typically the term is used in technology circles in a positive way to indicate a product that is so vastly superior to its predecessors that it drastically alters the world.  Disruptive technologies are not simply evolutionary, or even revolutionary, improvements to an existing technology, but are new technologies that usually completely displace the competition.  For computer user, possibly the best example is the USB flash drive, which exploded on the market due to its superiority over its predecessor (floppy disks - remember them?) in both storage capacity and ease of use.

While the term is relatively new, the concept is not.  We have seen disruptive technologies time and time again, from candles to gas to electric lighting, from Conestoga wagons to Volvo semis, from cooking on wood fires to gas stoves to electric ranges (and back to gas stoves and wood-fired pizza ovens again; evidently disruptive technologies can be cyclical).  However, the pace of disruptive change certainly seems to be increasing, and everyone from the Gartner Group to the Washington Post pronouncing their "Top 10" disruptive technologies.

Educational technology has certainly seen its share of disruptive technologies, which started me thinking about my personal "Top 10" disruptive technologies in our business.  I quickly realized it would be impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of technologies that have radically changed the way we educate our students, but have chosen a few representative examples that you will find in the next posts.  I am interested in reader comment on these, so hope you will post your own personal favorite disruptors.
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2 comments:

Adam Hunt said...

Current favorites/possibilities:
1. iphone (smartphones)-will change the way people think about computer use.
2. web 2.0-changing the way people interact and share information
3. VoIP-again, change views on how communications can work

April 24, 2008 at 3:04 PM
Joe Schiska said...

You're definitely correct about VoIP. We recently updated our PBX to a Cisco VoIP solution, and candidly I thought some of the stress on unified communications was salesperson hype. After implementation, I was amazed at how quickly staff moved to a preference for picking up their voicemail via e-mail not only for the simplification of getting all your messages in one place, but also in response to the increased functionality of being able to identify the voicemail by caller, prioritize messages, and share the voicemail easily with other staff who need to be "in the loop." This wasn't limited to the staff who are always early technology adopters, but also to some who are usually technology leery yet recognized how much value add was offered by the new system.

April 24, 2008 at 5:02 PM

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