Except I believe in digital education. The author’s opinion is wrong on that matter.
There are uses for computers in education but having kids build Shakespeare blogs or Facebook pages as described in the article aren’t among them.
I believe in Alvin Toffler's formulation, "High Touch and High Tech."That is essentially what Apple has been doing. And, in digital education, there is khanacademy.org. The high tech aspect of KhanAcademy is that the Internet delivers the content on demand, and provides sample problems automatically, giving a teacher or coach complete insight into a student's progress and any specific difficulties. The high touch aspect of it is that the lectures, by Salman Khan, are done in a very human and approachable way. Even though it would be easier for him to simply redo a lecture when he makes a mistake while lecturing, he has his team simply annotate the video to correct the error. That is humility, and it makes the experience very human.
The fact that the lectures are short, essentially spontaneous, and available on demand means that the student is unlikely to feel intimidated by the process. Indeed, the "on demand" nature of the video lectures has, according to Khan, made them even better accepted by students than live, interactive discussions with him.
Students can learn from KhanAcademy alone, but an even "higher touch" approach is to "flip the classroom" of a school, having the students view the lectures at home and devote the classroom to human interaction around the practice exercises which traditionally have been "homework."
So, yes indeed, very interesting educational work can be done with the aid of computers. I certainly hope Khan succeeds in "flipping the classroom" in education generally. Apple has made a significant thrust into education with its authoring tool, available free to Mac users, to empower textbook authors to port learning tools to the iPad. And with concomitant iPad software to view and interact with the educational content, making notes and empowering drill and practice.I suppose that it is entirely possible to misuse such tools to the detriment of the child's education. It's not obvious that Khan needs those tools. He is on record as questioning whether textbooks are needed at all with his approach. I think that books are in their own way more accessible than digital content, tho . . .