Korea plans to eliminate textbooks in schools by 2015

[carpetmojo]

And the children will lose the habit/knack/ability/desire to surf real books ?

I find that incredibly ...sad, I suppose.
I am so happy my child has grown up with both, and I can never see him losing the real book experience.

And for all those who say, that's fine, no problem, they should go anyway, we don't need them - I find that incredibly sad as well.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Joonbug1

As for converting all the textbooks to digital - why have it need to be exclusively one or the other? Why can't they have both? What if there's a national power surge or something and all their data goes kaput?

My guess is that it has to do with printing costs and distribution. If the demand for paper becomes lower, the costs will increase, and nobody wants to pay more for paper textbooks.

And if there is a national power surge they will have bigger problems to worry about, and in wouldn't affect unconnected devices (anything mobile), so anything on those is safe, plus anything that is in cloud storage would be safely stored in other countries as well.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

And the children will lose the habit/knack/ability/desire to surf real books ?

How would this make them lose the ability to surf real books?

[carpetmojo]

Because, presumably, the aim is for all school & homework to be done electronically - hence a lack of exposure to, familiarity with, and abscence of learning the "how to " skills connected with physically using "real" books and information.
That's all.

[Sil_liS]

But I can still read text off stone tablets, even if I didn't learn to read on them.
And when it comes to the way in which the information is presented, I think that the fact that digital information isn't bound to a physical format would bring improvements to the way people assimilate the data.

[RainingLemur]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

They make celebrities out of people who play Starcraft.

Somehow, America made celebrities out of Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton...

I think that being a superb Starcraft player is good enough for celebrity-dom.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by RainingLemur

Somehow, America made celebrities out of Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton...

I think that being a superb Starcraft player is good enough for celebrity-dom.

And at least the Starcraft players have done something.

[Kali Yuga]

The sky is falling? Again? It must be Monday.

I don't see a problem with this -- if the final medium they select is capable of displaying the required text and graphics, has sufficient battery life, allows for annotations, and can minimize distractions (e.g. no texting on the devices).

There is nothing magic about paper, LCD screens won't burn out your eyes or steal your soul. Alleged problems with the South Korean educational system have absolutely nothing to do with textbook mediums. The cost savings of using ebooks are likely to be substantial, especially for literature texts that don't require updating.

Most of the industrialized world is going to wind up switching to ebooks for schools in the next 15-20 years, and South Korea is going to get there first. You might want to get mentally prepared for what is almost certainly an inevitable shift in education infrastructure.

[carpetmojo]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

....And when it comes to the way in which the information is presented, I think that the fact that digital information isn't bound to a physical format would bring improvements to the way people assimilate the data.

I'm afraid that feeling's creeping over me that I get when students are referred to as customers, teachers as facilitators, and a narrow educational curriculum as being a means of finding a particular form of employment for the good of "our country" or, worse, "all our people".

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

[din155]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

There is nothing magic about paper, LCD screens won't burn out your eyes or steal your soul. Alleged problems with the South Korean educational system have absolutely nothing to do with textbook mediums. The cost savings of using ebooks are likely to be substantial, especially for literature texts that don't require updating.

What’s wrong with digitising the textbooks and what has educational system got to do with this? Or, is it ok for students to spend time online but is wrong to learn using same medium?

[hidari]

ink, paper, books, chalk, blackboards, white boards...Don't need electricity or batteries to work. I like the idea but as on MIT prof put it in the last three thousand years pen and ink are still the most versatile and useful invention by man as regards to writing/reading...

[Skibble]

Up until I married a man in the USAF and had to move, I was a teacher at a private school in Alabama. While the textbooks were not available in ebook form, some of the supplementary readings I used in my history courses were.

I found that most students who refused to pick up normal books were more than happy to read the ebook versions, using a reader on loan from our school library. It wasn't just that it was less hassle for them to keep up with a small reader as opposed to a collection of paperbacks -- they responded to the idea of reading on a screen. What had been a chore became second nature to them.

I think that, just as paper books continue to "speak" to some of us, digital books "speak" to others. If the majority of the upcoming generation seems to fall into the latter category, then South Korea stands to benefit greatly from this project.

I do wish, however, that there was a way to keep traditional books alongside ebooks in the classroom. There will always been those who don't respond in the same way as the majority.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by hidari

ink, paper, books, chalk, blackboards, white boards...Don't need electricity or batteries to work. I like the idea but as on MIT prof put it in the last three thousand years pen and ink are still the most versatile and useful invention by man as regards to writing/reading...

And in another thousand years they will think of the the stylus and e-ink as pen and paper and people will say that nothing has changed. The pen you use now is not that same as what people were using a thousand years ago.

[gastan]

"... the Korean education ministry has revealed it will spend US$2.4 billion on buying appropriate devices and digitizing content for them."

What I'm hoping for from this is that, with that much money being tossed around, maybe ... just maybe ... someone there will finally come up with a decent pdf reader app.