Our friend 'Alice'

With the progression of technology comes the question of technology in education. Education has always been about reading books and learning to write, but with the increase of digital cultures should we look to be changing this somewhat 'old fashioned' way of learning. In my opinion, reading and writing will always be the foundations of an education and technology shouldn't be brought in until later in a childs education. But thats not to say we should ignore it completley, as it could be extremley effective.
In this weeks lecture we looked specifically into Digital literature and the idea that the National Cirriculum could begin to involve online ways of learning. In particular we were advised to look at a website called 'Inanimate Alice.' http://www.inanimatealice.com/ This link to the website will tell you all you need to know about the project. Inanimate Alice has been "created as a reading-from-the-screen experience." It tells the story of a young girl, and as a reader you follow the girl as she grows up and go through the story with her, watching the video, reading the words, listening to the sounds and looking at the pictures.
The argument is, should this be included in the National Cirriculum? For me, there is alot of benefits to this project. It uses a range of multimedia which could be beneficial to some learners who get bored with simply reading words on a page. It also allows the reader to go at a pace which suits them best, stopping and starting as they wish. Therefore to some extent it could be quite a useful and a new way of teaching and keeping children interacted. At the same time it is fairly simple, and so i think that aiming for teenagers might be slightly too old as it isnt very taxing, and some brighter students could grow out of it very quickly.
Therefore it does clearly have benefits and drawbacks, and I think whether you think it is a good idea or a bad idea will all depend on the person and the type of learner you are. People who are very against multimedia and computing will not agree that it should be included in the National Cirriculum, yet those whoe enjoy aesthetics, collaborations and multimedia might think the opposite.
Whether you think Inanimate Alice is good or bad there is no denying that projects like this are being produced because of how rapidly technologies are developing. And clearly there is a gap in education for things like this website to develop, as alot of children these days do focus on computing and social websites. I think maybe it is time to accept that a new wave of teaching and education could be on its way as a consequence of new technologies.