Tuesday, November 27, 2007
$100 laptop and Amazon digital books
The rise of Amazon's new digital book, combined with the "$100" laptop ($188 is current cost of manufacturing) has big implications in world education if we can get past the cost. I find it interesting that schools in third world countries are buying laptops when they can't afford chalk, pencils, or anything else. However, with internet access, computers are far more important than any of that other stuff. Especially if you can download books on line, especially text books. Now there just needs to be someone with the courage to offer free downloads of old textbooks. I noticed in Mali, they just don't have any way to learn, since there aren't enough books for everyone. I think the combination of the $100 laptop, a few generous professors who say screw it, I'm open sourcing my textbook could revolutionize the bottom of the pyramid's education system. This will never happen, since professors make huge profits off of textbooks, hence the "revisions" of editions every few years. I would love to write some simple textbooks, like basic math, basic science, etc, and not copyright them and make them available for download. There would be no profit, but if you could get a bunch of people working on it, it wouldn't be too big of a deal. The problem is, with higher level of courses that are changing, it would be difficult since not having any financial incentive to advance the field could hinder development. But basic k-8 science and math aren't really changing as far as I know. Anyway, just a quick thought for the day.
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I like the idea of free textbooks for developing countries. If these places have computers, there would be no additional cost to creating digital textbooks for these places. One idea would be to look for texts that are old enough to no longer be covered by copywrite. For some subjects, this might be sufficient. Another idea would be to have a wiki-style text book that is ultimately reviewed and edited by teachers. Wikipedia has a section for this, but I'm not sure how developed it is. Here's the "bookshelf" for mathematics. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Mathematics_bookshelf
I haven't looked to see what kind of information is there. If this was a little more sanctioned, and reviewed by educators, translated into different languages, something like this could be beneficial for students without access to traditional textbooks.
A wireless, digital book reader for 400 bucks?!? Apparently somebody thinks it's neat, because Amazon is sold out. And I think 10 dollars for a digital edition of a book seems like a lot of money. How much is one of those tablet PCs? That would give you the full functionality of a laptop and you'd be able to swivel the screen around and get the same look as this reader.
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