South Korea's Education Ministry has decreed that all paper textbooks will be converted to digital by 2015, thus relieving them of the fifty-pound packs that my American children have been carrying to school every day.
The intent is that tablet computers, smart phones and other display devices will be used to read textbooks and do homework. Academic testing will also be done online.
Students with special needs will have content customized for them, and the computers supporting educational materials will have "two-way study methods" included.
One wonders if the other content usually read by school children will also be digitized and tabletized.
In his 1985 classic Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card made sure every student had a "desk", a tablet computer that presented information and provided sophisticated testing called "Free Play".
Ender doodled on his desk, drawing contour maps of mountainous islands and then telling his desk to display them in three dimensions from every angle...
The bell rang. Everyone signed off their desks or hurriedly typed in reminders to themselves. Some were dumping lessons or data into their computers at home.
(Read more about the desk from Ender's Game)
Poul Anderson's 'Brain Wave'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors." - Poul Anderson, 1953.
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