June 8th, 2009
Schwarzenegger "terminates" spending: Kindle for every California student?
Governor Schwarzenegger has scrapped funding for textbook contracts in a bid to fill a massive budget gap of $24 billion, and aiming to introduce electronic readers to digitalise the classroom.
I couldn’t help but use the Terminator quote in this one.
The simple fact of the matter is, the governor is trying to cut down on spending due to the global financial crisis, a number of state issues within California and, quite honestly probably down to bad budget management. Instead of spending millions of dollars on books which, in this day and age, go out of date before they are even published, electronic readers such as the Kindle allow digital books to be downloaded at a cheaper cost and can be updated over the air when and where necessary.
Every high school student in California will be given access to Kindle-like devices, full of a standard spectrum of science, maths, physics, chemistry, earth sciences and more, according to the fact sheet available on the Governor’s website. The devices will hopefully be ready by the time of the next academic year, in Autumn/fall 2009.
Schwarzenegger also pointed out that digital textbooks “open the door to more interactive learning”. Whilst this is true, the fact that books have been around for longer than the majority of the sovereign states this world has. I am still skeptical of the idea that books are being slowly pushed out of the loop, and hope that at least traditional universities - Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh - will keep the fine collections they have accumulated for generations to come.
Knowledge is power - books still kick Kindle arse, in my honest opinion; especially in the UK where half the features don’t seem to work.
Rajesh Mirchandani, reporter with the BBC said:
“Governor Schwarzenegger believes Internet activities such as Facebook, Twitter and downloading to iPods show that young people are the first to adopt new online technologies, and so the Internet is also the best way to learn in classrooms.”
Yeah, give a teenager a computer with Facebook access - they’ll get loads of work done. A good percentage of my year group failed at least one exam because they can’t physically log out of the site.
I have previously made it clear my thoughts on the Kindle, and they are not those of a positive nature. However, this initiative, half-baked and half-arsed as it is, created as a consequence rather than a policy advised decision which I suspect it is, may well sway me to another level of thinking.
“I pity ‘da fool who don’t stay in school”… oh wait, that was Mr. T. I was never good with American television personalities.
Zack Whittaker, the youngest in the ZDNet network, is a British student at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he studies BA (Hons) Criminology and Social Policy. His insight into the next-generation is unique and first-hand, sharing his knowledge of the here and now but more so what's next and how to get there.
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