Obviously, one or two paragraphs cannot do justice to technologies that require several books each, and my list has undoubtedly omitted several important developments (e.g., gaming, edupunk, automatic assessment, virtual reality, and Google might all be contenders). However, from this brief overview, a number of themes can be extracted to help inform the next twenty years.The first of these is that in edtech, the tech part of the phrase walks taller. In my list, most of the innovations are technologies. Sometimes these come with strong accompanying educational frameworks, but other times they are a technology seeking an application. This is undoubtedly a function of my having lived through the first flush of the digital revolution. A future list may be better balanced with conceptual frameworks, pedagogies, and social movements.Second, several ideas recur, with increasing success in their adoption. Learning objects were the first attempt at making teaching content reusable, and even though they weren’t successful, the ideas they generated led to OER, which begat open textbooks. So, those who have been in the edtech field for a while should be wary of dismissing an idea by saying: “We tried that; it didn’t work.” Similarly, those proposing a new idea need to understand why previous attempts failed.Third, technology outside of education has consistently been co-opted for educational purposes. This has met with varying degrees of success. Blogs, for instance, are an ideal educational technology, whereas Second Life didn’t reach a sustainable adoption. The popularity of—or the number of Wired headlines about—a technology does not automatically make it a contender as a useful technology for education.This leads into the last point: education is a complex, highly interdependent system. It is not like the banking, record, or media industries. The simple transfer of technology from other sectors often fails to appreciate the sociocultural context in which education operates. Generally, only those technologies that directly offer an improved, or alternative, means of addressing the core functions of education get adopted. These core functions can be summarized as content, delivery and recognition.28 [#fn28] OER, LMS, and online assessment all directly map onto these functions. Yet even when there is a clear link, such as between e-portfolios and recognition, the required cultural shifts can be more significant. Equally, edtech has frequently failed to address the social impact of advocating for or implementing a technology beyond the higher education sector. MOOCs, learning analytics, AI, social media—the widespread adoption of these technologies leads to social implications that higher education has been guilty of ignoring. The next phase of edtech should be framed more as a conversation about the specific needs of higher education and the responsibilities of technology adoption.When we look back twenty years, the picture is mixed. Clearly, a rapid and fundamental shift in higher education practice has taken place, driven by technology adoption. Yet at the same time, nothing much has changed, and many edtech developments have failed to have significant impact. Perhaps the overall conclusion, then, is that edtech is not a game for the impatient.