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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."
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!
> digital copies last in pristine condition even when handled by schoolkids
This problem could have been solved by handing out pdfs, which they can print out over and over again. They could make notes on them and still have the originals. They wouldnt have to carry the whole book around all the time, they could just take a few pages they need. They wouldnt have to take as care of them as of books, becouse they could always be reprinted when destroyed or lost.
Why does the education system rely on overpriced commercial literature at all? Why doesnt it work to hire 1-2 experts per subject and let them write for hire definitive textbooks for the particular subject which then could be used without any royalties for years and decades by thousands of students? Why are they forced to buy new books over and over when everybody has a printer at home?
I am an expat who lives in South Korea. I have never seen a K-12 textbook which costs more than 8,000 won (~$8 USD). In fact, I have about five middle school textbooks on my shelf from the current year, and they only cost between 1,000 and 3,000 won each. Oddly, the "international" textbooks (read: American textbooks simply labeled as "Not for sale in the US.") actually cost about half of what they would back home.
Sadly, you get outside of textbooks, and the prices for English books are pretty costly.
I did not do my homework because the publisher revoked a book that I foolishly thought that I owned.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.