What good is e-learning?
Friday 5 October, 3.30pm until 6.00pm, london knowledge lab Satellite Events

Will the new media technologies increasingly to be deployed in schools really change how children learn? In promising a more personalised approach to learning, they offer a vision of each child reaching their full potential, through being actively involved in choosing their own learning paths and styles. While the national curriculum may remain in place as an overall set of objectives, schools will cease to offer a ‘one size fits all’ system of education. Teachers will do less teaching in the traditional sense, but will become guides helping children along their chosen learning paths, facilitated and mediated through ‘virtual learning environments’.

Not everyone accepts the idea that children are best taught in this way and some fear that this new direction may fragment education and undermine its capacity to give children a broad view of the world and a clear sense of their future within it. What is the best way of thinking about the innovatory potential of new technologies in education? How can we make the most of what they can offer while keeping the best of what a teacher-led, subject-based curriculum has provided in the past?

The seminar will be followed by a wine reception. Visit the Academy of Ideas website for further event details and tickets.

 Speakers

David Buckingham
professor of education, Institute of Education; director, Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media
Chris Poole
Building Schools for the Future lead, Microsoft
Toby Marshall
A Level Film Studies Teacher; PhD researcher in sociology of education, UCL Institute of Education
Keri Facer
research director, Futurelab
Chair:
Dr Wendy Earle
impact development officer, Birkbeck, University of London; convenor, Academy of Ideas Arts and Society Forum

 Produced by

Dr Wendy Earle impact development officer, Birkbeck, University of London; convenor, Academy of Ideas Arts and Society Forum

Beyond technology: rethinking learning in the age of digital culture, David Buckingham

Is ICT transforming learning?, Keri Facer

After the bubble has burst , Toby Marshall

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Session partners