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Arizona School Won't Use Textbooks

Some Guy writes "A high school in Vail will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans."

2 of 491 comments (clear)

  1. Alter-universe by Dark+Coder · · Score: 4, Informative

    Top 10 things you're likely to hear shortly after the bell.

    10. Canius Virii ate my homework.
    9. Not now, I'm IM'ing with my broker
    8. Press me and I'll press this button erasing your server
    7. Road crew didn't blog their detours.
    6. PDF Midterms -- Fresh off the teacher's home server, send $$ to PayPal.
    5. Check out Mr. Crabapple's latest decline at RateMyTeacher.Com
    4. Acrobat Reader is crashing... I couldn't bone up on it overnite.
    3. Microsoft locked out PDF in favor of XML. Do you have an XML reader?
    2. Not enough memstick-space
    1. I can't read.

  2. Re:My deepest fear: text changing on the fly by Jherek+Carnelian · · Score: 4, Informative

    Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows that this is one of the hallmarks of a controlled society.
    As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost.


    This is already happening, and it is indeed scary.
    They just don't quite have the untraceable part down yet.

    About a decade ago, Time Magazine published an essay by Bush Sr and Secretary of Defense Scowcroft on why they chose not take out Sadam during the first gulf war. A lot of the points they made have been proven true today.

    Time DELETED the article from their online archives. It was as if it were never written, URLs that once worked are now road-kill on the information super-highway. Not only that, but significant changes were made to other articles in that same issues as compared to the print version.

    Fortunately it wasn't quite so untraceable and has been widely reported (not widely enough IMNHO). Here is one take on the story, you can find plenty more by googling for bush scowcroft "reasons not to invade".

    http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/hesket h.html