Attention students: hate carrying around textbooks? Love using technology to learn? Well, think about moving to South Korea! South Korea, ranked 8th out of 176 on the United Nation’s 2008 Education Index (for a comparison: the United States ranks 20th), wants to create an environment in which students can study anywhere and anytime while using better and more interactive content. South Korea’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced that it would invest 2.2 Trillion Korean Won (about 2 billion US Dollars) by 2015 in an effort to develop digital textbooks for all subjects and all schools. The Ministry has stated that these proposed digital textbooks will contain all of the information of the printed textbooks and will also include helpful multimedia and reference sources that would enhance the learning process for all students in South Korea. The South Korean government, perhaps taking a page out of Apple’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, Microsoft’s or any other major technology corporation’s playbook(s), also wants to create a cloud computing system so that students can access these digital textbooks from any computer at any time. Moreover, the Ministry plans to provide students of low-income families with Tablet PCs in addition to setting up wifi networks in all schools. The Ministry also plans to have these textbooks accessible by computer, tablet, and smartphone. Of course, all components of this proposed plan would require a huge server, but South Korea already seems to have plans to accommodate such a device.
In my opinion, these changes sound very cool. Students these days are becoming more and more accustomed to using technology to enhance their working and learning. Obviously there are many down-sides of this plan. Textbooks don’t run on batteries. Computers do. Textbooks are much easier than computers to replace when lost or stolen. The list goes on. Personally, I feel that having to use a Tablet PC for your work can actually be less productive than using a textbook because Tablet PCs have other features that may distract the user (such as internet and games). For this plan to work, students is South Korea would also have to become more computer literate. Textbooks are very simple to use and there is a “realness” aspect of them: writing in a textbook feels like writing; highlighting feels like highlighting. Computers/Tablet PCs on the other hand are not as innately understood. In any case, South Korea’s dedication to the development to digital textbooks is just another chapter in our “Information Age”, and I, for one, am excited to see how this plan evolves.
What do you think about this topic? Leave your questions, comments, and/or thoughts below!
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