Digital Technologies and Their Role in Achieving Our Ambitions for Education (IOE Inaugural Professorial Lectures)

Educational policy aims are very ambitious: from pre-school to lifelong learning they demand improvements in both quantity and quality. These demands have wide-ranging effects on teaching workloads. It is difficult to achieve these aims effectively without rethinking our approach to teaching and learning. Our essentially nineteenth-century model of educational institutions does not scale up to the requirements of a twenty-first century society. Despite their potential to contribute to a rethink, digital technologies have usually been used in a technology-driven way to upgrade our existing educational models. There is an alternative: an education-driven approach to the use of digital technologies to achieve our ambitions for education.