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Disruptive technologies are new technologies that help create a new market and value network, going on in time to eventually disrupt the existing market and value network by displacing an earlier technology. In opposition to such disruptive effect, there are sustainable technologies, which evolve incrementally, enhancing existing markets and enabling companies to compete through sustained improvements. Disruptive technologies have a potential to significantly transform a certain domain where they are deployed. The term disruptive is used because these technologies fundamentally change the existing landscape of that domain, producing a new and more efficient way of accomplishing specific tasks in that field, making previous methods irrelevant, and forever revolutionizing that industry.

The prospect of disrupting education by means of technology is not a new phenomenon. Films, TVs, computers, videocassettes, and CD-ROMs all at some point seemed to hold the revolutionary solution to the evergrowing maladies of the existing educational system. Although the results were not completely void of success, none of these inventions transformed learning in substantial ways. However, it is possible to say that some emerging technologies are in fact causing disruption in different aspects of education: pedagogy, monitoring learning progress, content access and availability, interaction with others and content for the purpose of learning, and assessment of learning outcomes. There are also signals that this time we are experiencing something significantly different. Much of the difference is a result of the kinds of new technologies available and the fact that they have become ever more accessible at a very low cost. All of these technologies, as in the past, have been developed for other uses in everyday life and later have made their way to education in a significantly disruptive fashion.

The technologies discussed here are the foundation of innovative forms of teaching and learning, and are responsible for a drastic change in how learning can be achieved, in many cases redefining and reshaping the educational landscape. This entry discusses mobile technologies, cloud computing and software as a service, big data and data analytics, APIs (application programming interfaces), HTML5 (HyperText Markup Languages), and wearable computing technologies.

Mobile Technologies

Mobile technologies refer to hardware and software that compose mobile devices. The spectrum of such devices is large, with a commonality of being both personal as well as portable, and includes mobile phones, MP3 players, tablets, laptops, netbooks, and e-readers. The growing number of features and ubiquitous adoption are pushing these devices to indispensability; some frequently substitute for computers. Better access due to enhanced transmission speeds and relative lower cost devices hold a promise of providing varied learning experiences: contextualized, just in time, real time, collaborative, media rich and location specific. These devices are seen are intrinsically networked, enabling communication and information sharing with extreme immediacy. Many of the applications originally developed for e-learning purposes are being adapted for mobile devices, while an entire set of learning applications are specifically developed for mobiles: from apps that help young children read and spell to quizzes and games for learning physics and chemistry to apps designed to help working adults learn a foreign language.

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