John Bielec is vice president for Information Resources and Technology and CIO at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He reviews what he sees as continuing or accelerating trends, from "the move from assets to access," through "more choice" and "ubiquitous personal mobility, to the "EDU App," and, finally, to intense product competition. 

The biggest disruptive technological force over the past decade has been the move from “assets to access.” One no longer needs to own assets—data centers, servers, storage, or applications—to take advantage of high-tech services. Access to the internet is all that is required, with resources and applications a “click” away. Institutions, corporations, and even governments are busy following the lead of the consumer accessing new applications and moving as quickly as possible to the “cloud.” Interestingly, many university departments across the world have not yet adopted these “new realities” and still struggle in today’s resource-constrained environment, delivering e-mail, web-based services, and other homegrown applications as they have done since the late ’80s.

 Pay close attention to the "EDU App" thing. If you do not use "Apps," you probably cannot understand how their use is quickly changing the substrate of the learning world. You may read this: "This year will see a new launch of smart phone apps. With more and more institutions reacting quickly to heightened student expectations, the result will be a veritable smorgasbord of app choices where students will load up what they need and reject the rest" and really not know why it is important. But it is!