A recent article in The Economist details South Korea's transition from "dead-tree" textbooks to wireless, digital learning materials for students
The Economist, with a posting at their Banyan-Asia blog, reports that the nation of South Korea is looking to go digital in all of its education materials in the next 4 years.
WHEN school textbooks make the headlines in East Asia, they are usually cast as bystanders to some intractable old dispute, and related demands that children be taught “correct” history. Thankfully though, future-minded officials in South Korea have given cause for this correspondent to write about something altogether different: by 2015, all of the country’s dead-tree textbooks will be phased out, in favour of learning materials carried on tablet computers and other devices.
According to the blog-post, the cost of setting up the network will be more than $2 billion. The hope is that with the removal of the paper costs, some of those savings will go towards compensating for this expenditure. Certainly the environmentalists will be ecstatic. A cloud network will be set up to host digital copies of all existing textbooks, and to give students access materials at any time. They will be able to access those materials through a whole host of devices, including: iPads, smartphones, netbooks, and PCs.
Kids will need to come up with a new range of excuses for not doing their homework: the family dog cannot be blamed for eating a computer, nor can a file hosted on a cloud network be left behind on a bus.
The South Korean education ministry plans to use the network to offer online classes for children who are too ill to attend school. South Korea has a dedicated focus on education and most parents in the country drive their students fairly hard. With the advent of this technology, there will now be no excuse for a South Korean child to get their work done.
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