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Would the Developing World Use E-Readers More Than Laptops?
Barence writes "Stuart Turton writes about how the local children reacted to his Kindle on a recent visit to the Nagpur region of India. 'About 20 kids stood in a big group, just watching me: big eyes, curious expressions, ridiculously cute and all intent on the Kindle,' he writes. 'Just turning the page caused them to drag their friends over, and there's no reality where changing the font size of your book should make you cooler than a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo. That was just the warm-up act though; it was the text-to-speech feature that pretty much made me the best friend of the entire village. A charity could do a lot worse than to load a few up with dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations,' he observes."
Better than text-to-speech: http://librivox.org/
It's a project where volunteers make audio books of public domain works. So you get a real reading rather than a robotic best effort.
I hope free software projects combine this with the public domain texts to make cool materials for people (kids and adults) learning languages.
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Can anybody with one of these say whether you find the text-to-speech to be good enough to use? It's hard to come by audio editions of many books, and reading while driving isn't a great combo.
It's a good idea, and I'm sure they'd get used... until they break.. If you send high tech electronics to the middle of Africa to help schools, what will happen when they break? There is no local Apple Store, Best Buy, or Kindle repair hut to help get them back up and running...
If you turn off the wireless, a Kindle can go for over a month without a charge. If you want to get information to people who lack reliable power, eink displays really do make a huge difference.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I find it interesting that the Kindle is seen as this great magical device for the developing world, when it in fact: 1. Limits the ability to share a book 2. Has a way to delete the entire book without recourse. Why would anyone want such a device in the developed world? Why would they not resist such a device in a developing world? Me thinks this is just kindle product placement.
Kindles are for consumers, laptops for creators.
You can't write on a Kindle, you can't code on a Kindle. It is okay as a book replacement but it does NOT allow the same freedom as a laptop.
I do not oppose the use of tech in teaching but let us remember that some of the brightest mind that ever lived did their work long before the PC or any of its parts where ever invented. You can do amazing things with some paper and ink.
Westerners also forget that places like India got one difference. You need to beat the kids to get out of school instead of in. They WANT to learn. They don't need gadgets or special programs to motivate them. Al they need is teachers. Less gadgets, more teachers. And really, if a paper mathbook is ten years out of date, so what? That only matters if you wish to overhaul the entire education system every 2 years so teachers spend more time on administration then teaching. 1+1=2, it has done so for a long time and will continue to do so and teachers have educated children with slates better then most kids get educated with PC's.
If you really wish to help as a westerner, fund open books, so school books costs only the printing costs (trivial) and not the copyright costs. In some places in the world you can have an education for the price of a Kindle. Send a child to school, not have him become a Amazon consumer.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not always the best choice, I'd agree. But with your modern ereaders you can fit hundreds, if not thousands, of books on a single device. And you can easily get thousands of books for free for these devices. You'd be hard pressed to find a publisher willing to donate thousands of print books for free. For a few books the paper route is cheaper, for sure, but once you get to tens or hundreds the argument for technology becomes much more enticing. I would think it would also be easier to convince a publisher to donate 1000 copies of an ebook than it would be for 1000 print books.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Having been to the heart of Ethiopia, I can tell you what they really need are jobs. Yea, food, education, clean water... that's all good, but none of it will remain there without money and they only way to keep money there is to build factories to employee the people. "Nothing but nets" nearly put every net manufacturer in Africa out of business. Food aid in Hattie drove most of the local food growers, distribution networks and street vendors out of business.
Instead of giving them free laptops, how about we invest in real books... put the publishing company IN the community where the books are needed and hire the populace to produce them. Then sell those books to charities at a discount rate to be given to school children. You employ hundreds of adults, educate thousands of kids and leave an industry in place that could last for decades.
worldreader.org has this mission:
Our mission is to put a library of books into the hands of children and families in the developing world with e-reader technology.
(disclosure: A friend of mine from College is on the team)
coding is life
Why use a device (Kindle, iPad) that is optimized for consumption, when the most benefit comes from creating content. A computer is a far better educational tool, and eventually a better economic driver. While we picture the developing world as a bunch of mud huts, there is a significant population that live in urban settings, with internet access and electricity. They can use real computers to create web sites, download sophisticated open source software to run businesses, and take online courses in multiple subjects.
for foodstuffs at any rate:
http://www.heifer.org/
Putting in a printing plant is an interesting idea, but needs a _lot_ of infrastructure (where do you get paper and ink from? printing plates? glue?).
The problem is, any sort of competitive printing press would quickly saturate and over-whelm the local market --- where do they sell to after the local school has a full set of textbooks (less than a month's production effort).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This is really what OLPC was supposed to be. A $100 (or $200, whatever) ereader and laptop. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line people got more interested in trying to deploy untested educational software rather than make the ebook part work properly. It still doesn't.