South Korean Textbooks to Go Digital by 2015 123
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."
digital rights (Score:2, Interesting)
Right, that removes the only real reason to keep buying new textbooks every year - digital copies last in pristine condition even when handled by schoolkids (no guarantee about the reader devices though). But who wants to bet the textbook companies will saddle them with restrictive licenses and digital rights management so that the schools will actually be unable to reuse the digital textbook licenses they bought the previous year?
Re:digital rights (Score:4, Interesting)
This problem could have been solved by handing out pdfs, which they can print out over and over again.
You are aware that printer ink is one of the most expensive commodities on Earth, right?
However, You can do all those beneficial things WITHOUT INK or toner, if you just had a tablet PC... Make notes, "File -> Save As..."
As for printing...WHY? Just call up the document from the wireless server if it's not in your course data package on your device for some reason.
I had to buy all of my textbooks in Highshcool because of a car accident. The cost was over $500 -- That was one semester / one year, and get this -- now that I've long sense graduated: I can't refer to the books.
However, when I taught myself to code in 1992 (age 12) I saved the example code that I had entered and some references and guides I downloaded from Compuserve and other BBSs -- Oh, look, it's on my local NAS, and my S3 storage, and I can pull it right up on my desktop, my netbook, my thinkpad, or my OLPC, from anywhere in the world, at any time (provided Internet access is available, or I've had the forethought to download it to the internal storage).
You know, for a race that's actually got some amazing technology that we only dreamed of in the recent past, we sure are reluctant to use it...
Re:digital rights (Score:4, Interesting)
I think asian countries are a bit different. At least in Japan, they don't heft heavy tomes of text books around, but use 6-8 week pamphlet that have their lessons/content for that period of time in that subject. I'm under the impression that those are owned by the school system.
If wikibooks or similiar took off, no reason that can't happen in schools. After all, there is no reason to really update algebra/calc books all that much. It was pretty much the same today as 100 years ago.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikibooks.org]