South Korean Textbooks to Go Digital by 2015 123
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the all-in-one-place dept.
from the all-in-one-place dept.
South Korea plans to spend $2.4 billion buying tablets for students and digitizing materials in an effort to go completely digital in the classroom by 2015. From the article: "This move also re-ignites the age-old debate about whether or not students learn better from screens or printed material. Equally important, there's the issue of whether or not devices with smaller form factors are as effective as current textbooks, which tend to have significantly more area on each page."
Re:digital rights (Score:5, Insightful)
> digital copies last in pristine condition even when handled by schoolkids
This problem could have been solved by handing out pdfs, which they can print out over and over again. They could make notes on them and still have the originals. They wouldnt have to carry the whole book around all the time, they could just take a few pages they need. They wouldnt have to take as care of them as of books, becouse they could always be reprinted when destroyed or lost.
Why does the education system rely on overpriced commercial literature at all? Why doesnt it work to hire 1-2 experts per subject and let them write for hire definitive textbooks for the particular subject which then could be used without any royalties for years and decades by thousands of students? Why are they forced to buy new books over and over when everybody has a printer at home?
Re:digital rights (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:New excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:digital rights (Score:4, Insightful)
They could easily find that purchasing the rights, as a work for hire, would be more cost-effective than purchasing copies.
I have this really crazy fucking idea. Totally nuts. But hear me out....
How about you "crowd source" with a couple dozen university doctorates, psychologists, and those that study effective learning techniques... and I dunnnnoooo... maybe give something back to the world ?
I'm sure that every engineer, scientist, and academic here realizes that their entire world is built on the efforts of others right? So why not contribute back to the environment that gave you the luxuries that you have? Why not become part of the foundation for the next generation of people that will push us ever farther forwards?
Screw the publishers and the book writers. Nothing in life says that they should be guarnteed a job and huge piles of cash. Or that when presented with an environmentally friendly and effective tool with the new technology we created (which was created most likely taking for granted all the hard work before it) we would not use it to its full potential?
I have nothing against people making money. However, if anything should follow the open source model, it is educational textbooks. If I really were smart enough and well respected enough in my field I would write a book if I thought it would help other people that do what I do. However, I doubt that I could create a book half as good as the programming books I have read anyways.
There really are some things that we should just all altruistically create for the Public Domain.