Friday November 18, 2011
Well, according to an article in "The Chronicle of Higher Education", South Korea plans to digitize all of its elementary and secondary school curriculum by the year 2015. This is occurring because the price of e-readers is doing down and the fact that Amazon has announced that it sells more e-books than print books.
Most items that an undergraduate needs to read is available in electronic form. According to Marc Prensky, he feels that nonelectronic books on campus should be banned or put in a museum. The advantages of a total electronic library would be:
1) Weaning students and scholars off the physical books of the past, colleges can find ways to ensure that they can achieve all results they want with integrated tools of the future.
2) Book and commentaries on books would start to be connected in ways they are not now.
3) Ideas would be freed from the printed page.
Print books in higher learning need to be in a museum and academics need to move to the tools of the future.
Not sure how I feel about all this but maybe I know how people felt when we moved away from clay tablets and scrolls. I mean I like learning new techniques but the comfort of a physical book would be hard to give up !
"The World Digital Library is an attempt to go beyond Eurpoe and the Americas... into cultures where the majority of the world is"-James Billington
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