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The high school I went to tried similar changes (not so much focused on technology but on the self-directed, free-form aspects of it) and put about half the students into the program.
For students with a strong personal drive to learn it was great. For students without one it made it even easier to mask minimal effort and defer what should be done now to what will be done later. My youngest sister made it through two years of high school with just 1.5 credits (as opposed to the 18 she should have had) before just dropping out. The program only lasted three years before parents pretty much stopped allowing their children to participate and it died on the vine.
I'm not saying that is necessarily the case in all such systems but I do start out with a bit of a raised brow. The problem as I see it is that most teenagers don't really have any interest in their education and if they aren't ridden pretty hard would happily sidestep it for all the things that seem more important when you're 15. The people who thrive under this approach tend, in my view, to be people who would have done pretty well anyway under strongly structured systems.
Also, the final sentence of that story highlights something I don't like about how we've come to view K-12. I think all public education should be, at core, vocational and for a lot of people that means it should have a different focus than simply being college preparedness. By forcing everybody into that box I think a lot of people don't see any purpose in what they are doing in high school.
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