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South Korean Textbooks to Go Digital by 2015
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."
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?
South Korean Textbooks to Go Digital by 2015
Oh yeah? Well in North Korea our textbooks will go digital by 2014! We'd do it even faster except we can't get enough parts to build our nkPads. Damn you Apple!
North Korea still the best Korea!
Not to mention that while it may seem like a lot, I bet business goes through significantly more. This is because the majority of pages printed/used in academia are actually read by someone (putting a limit on the number of pages used, since we can only read/write so fast). In business vast quantities of pages are printed that are read by someone once, then printed and used over and over again without reading (contracts or other forms for instance).
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
In my opinion, the debate is not screens vs paper its distracting environments vs non-distracting. If you try to do serious work/learning and you've got apps open for email,im,facebook etc. you're going to be interrupted every few minutes and each interruption breaks your concentration which is difficult and time consuming to regain later. I even close all distractions when I try to concentrate at work (the most important is email). So, it's possible to learn using a computer you just have to close everything not related to the task at hand.
I did not do my homework because my batteries ran out.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I used an ebook version of my history text book last year, and it worked relatively well. Other than a few formatting issues, I found it pretty easy to highlight things and make notes on my kindle. The only problem was that since it didn't retain the page numbers of the print edition it was next to impossible to reference in essays (in the end I had to use Google Books find the location of quotes in the print edition), but if they lean into this properly then they'll probably be more open to adapting the current referencing systems to be more up to date.
The environmental cost of that fancy, glossy paper is enormous, and textbooks are reprinted every few years either for political reasons or simply to keep the pocketbooks of the publishers padded.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the devices are intended to be used for something like 10 years then you might have a point. But lets be honest - they'll be "out of date" in 3 or 4 years and will be replaced.