Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Bye Bye Textbooks

This is an interesting report about a school in Tuscon, Arizona that is currently being built with technology in mind. The powers that be have decided to design the entire school around technology and one of the ways they have chosen to mitigate costs is to forego buying textbooks. Yup... and entire school without textbooks. Instead every student will be issued a laptop and every teacher will select readings from the Internet for their class.

It's an interesting and creative solution that cuts out the insidious problem of textbook edition changes and escalating costs of books. Also, a student no longer has to worry about a locker full of textbooks; instead they only have to worry about one laptop. The article goes on to say that those students who still love books won't go hungry, as there will be a conventional library on site.

I think this is a great idea.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The screen would need to be well designed - reading on-line can be quite rough on the eyes.

I'm not sure about the cost saving. Do they include upgrading of laptops?

Laptops may also be a good deal more fragile.

I guess I'd like to know how it went.

Evan
www.acupunctureiseasy.com