Cleary, the internet is likely to disrupt higher education. People like to be in control of learning by listening, fast forwarding videos and audios in their own time from home. How will this affect education? Already there is less need for big lecture theatres as more students take online options. It is not just students, staff too aren't as interested in attending lectures. Competition will become intense when geography is taken out of it - people will select the highest brand university for the best price.

Check out Educause and its website. That is really its mission and the website archives massive resources on this topic.  They have ingoing PD opportunities too 

One can cite many  technological developments impacting higher education in a positive way such as computers, printers, LCD, air conditioners…etc.

But some major technological developments have obvious negative impact upon higher education. I shall name two of them:

The internet has, unfortunately, been "cursed" by the social media which attracted the young students to register in them. This has led to two appalling results: 1) Many of them became too much involved which meant wasting time & effort with distractions from their studies. 2) The "short" posts or comments in these sites have taught them to become "shallow" so you will see the students asking for summarized notes or slides. Slowly, the students have developed an adverse attitude towards in-depth information and this will have "grave" consequences in the near future.

Smart phones are nice but many students have used them for "evil" purposes. Many professors caught students, recently, trying to cheat during exams by phones which stored entire books or notes. The solution of this problem is not easy since you cannot employ security personnel to scrutinize the students upon entering the exams' rooms if phones are banned. You also need a locker for each student in the campus to keep the phone in it at the time of an exam.

Hi Frederic,

I have got several materials from educase website.

Thank you so much,

Cheers

Excellent question - all of us are asking variations on this theme daily I would suspect. For a dozen or more years, I have been researching, teaching and publishing my human rights research under the rubric of 'Transdisciplinarity'. The term obviously connotes transcendence of disciplinary specializations, from multi- (two or more disciplines working collaboratively without integration), and inter- (two or more disciplines integrating concepts, methods, and tools) to transdisciplinary teams that include non-academics. In my writing, I define this term explicitly - there are lots of complaints and inter-changing in the literature to the contrary - as a global reform movement in higher education that is problem-focused, attempting to account for complexity in the present era, and to overcome the limits of Cartesian logic and Newtonian physics to make better sense of the world around us. In addition, along with some authors in South Africa (Du Plessis, Sehume and Martin, 2014), American states, Australia, and Peru we have included the notion of Indigenous epistemologies (see Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos for one of numerous discussions on this aspect), although many European-based authors leave out this way on engaging in post-colonial thinking and community-focused research. Various authors have contributed significant developments - Michigan's Wayne State professor Julie Thompson Klein, French sociologist Edgar Morin, Rumanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu, along with (and most particularly) the prolific, American-based poly-theorist and educator Alfonso Montuori all come quickly to mind. The term was coined simultaneously (see librarian Jay Bernstein's 2015 paper on this) by Jean Piaget, Morin and Austrian physicist Erich Jantsch after they attended the same 1970 OECD-sponsored education conference in Nice looking towards education in the 21st century. Nicolescu's widely referenced Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002) is certainly one place to begin, also Patricia Leavy (2011) and Victoria Martin (2017) have excellent handbook-type primers on this emergent epistemology for re-imagining higher education in the remaining decades of the 21st century. See R.C. Mitchell and S.A. Moore (2015) Muse, Ruse and Subterfuge: Transdisciplinary Praxis in Ontario's Post-Secondary Bricolage?", Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 37: 393-413 as one Canadian university tries to come to grips with the notion.

I guess social media is crucial, scholars are hesitant between allowing students and not. The second thing is to integrate social media into the curriculum... The this also touches on the issue of public vs. private. Using proprietary networks will make students careful to use. Finally, what are you aiming for from social media? All these will be disrupting technologies in HE.

I AGREE WITH ANSWER Nizar Matar

Hi! 

Many good recommendations already, I see. However, try to acquire a really long perspective on teaching, learning and information and communications technologies (ICTs). The works of the information philosopher Luciano Floridi are quite helpful. Begin with his popular science style work "The Fourth Revolution - How the infosphere is reshaping human reality". (Check out parts of it at Google books first.) One perspective that he has is that "documenting" and "communicating" ICTs have a long history, but all the time gets faster, cheaper, more accessible, more useful, gets less and less "informational friction". In this perspective, what we think is revolutionary with the Internet can also be seen as the continuation of a long history. But what is characteristic with DIGITAL ICTs, he asks. That they, now also called "syntactical entities" process information by themselves, which only "semantic entities" could do earlier (humans). The future us not about these ICTs taking over the world, but how we humans use them (how we "envelop" them) to try to understand what is truly human. Machines process information in a fast and precise way, but are "stupid as a toaster". Meaning and interpretation will still be human. 

Floridi writes a little about education himself in the book I recommended. You can also look in my recent thesis (chapter 8) for more speculations about this. Or check my attached thought experiment below that illustrates the road from a kind of non-technology situation until today. 

Research A back-to-basics thought experiment about blended learning

Thesis From blended learning to learning onlife - ICTs, time and ac...