An article review

 

The article I am about write about is named " Digital technologies and their role in achieving our ambitions for education". It was written by Diana Laurillard.

It starts with an interesting notion that says we should rethink how we use digital technologies to improve the existing education system and consider building a new model of education that will use digital technologies to achieve better educational goals. It states the fact today's world has different requirements for education and the existing systems should probably be completely transformed to suit these needs.
There have been numerous changes during the twenty first century such as personalisation of education, flexibility of syllabus and assessment, different collaborations and partnerships for education.

These changes, author says, are very ambitious and their realization is assigned to teachers and leaders which seems almost impossible for them to achieve.
Other factors including flexibility and inclusion cannot be guarranteed solely relying on teachers' expertise and effort. The author claims that teachers have a great deal of work load and in fact, there is lack of teachers and it unrealistic for teachers to teach 30 students in one class using personalized flexible approaches while they are required to do a lot of documentation, attend meetings and etc.

After mentioning several reasons why the current ambitions to improve the education system is not succeeding or will not succeed, the article states how digital technologies can become an answer for this problem.
It is suggested that digital technologies should be used as a system to analyse the needs of a student in the first stage and then the students should be able interact with the system and learn about different pedagogies they could be taught in. Students should get information about different modes of study, different opportunities and how they will be evaluated before they start their educational journey.

The author writes about e-learning strategy which was developed by one of her colleagues and how it fit different learners' needs and it can be perfectly flexible and inclusive.
There are also examples of various online projects which became successful such as: Making games by D. Buckingham and A. Burn, OpenLearn by The Open University, The Homework project by R.Luckin and so on.

I found the article quite persuasive. It suggests interesting ideas about the use of technologies not for education but in education. It is stated that digital technologies should not be only additional to education system but it should be a way of achieving education and I agree with the authors' ideas as our education system also has almost the same problems and I am convinced that digital technologies can be a way of solving these problems.