Dick Gordon: Kindles for 17M Public School Students
By Rico, 9:09 am Mon Feb 1 2010 - News - 5 Opinions
The only Filipino I know who uses a Kindle regularly is Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala. If Dick Gordon is elected president however, then public school students in the Philippines will be like the Ayala Corp. chairman.
As reported by ABS-CBN news (via Carlo Ople):
He also mapped out a plan to fund a $1.7 billion (or P85 billion) project to give 17 million students a Kindle. To fund the Kindle project, Gordon said plans to cut down on corruption, which amounts to about 300 billion pesos.
If this does not work, he plans to improve mining, an industry reportedly worth $1-trillion, to give additional funding for the free e-book reader project.
If both do not work, Gordon said the quickest way to raise funds is through a “text for education” campaign, where P0.50 from every 2 billion text messages will be used to fund teacher’s salaries and the Kindle project.
Sounds good: at the very least, students won’t have to lug heavy books to school, and it’s a lot easier to buy and distribute electronic textbooks than their paper counterparts. Though as always, the devil is in the details. First, how will Gordon make sure the Kindle actually ends up with the students? And who will pay for the electronic textbooks that need to be loaded into these eReaders before they actually become useful?
I also hope this plan is just the first phase; providing “only” 17 million students with Kindles will leave the rest behind. And what about textbook publishers, who stand to lose a lot of money if Gordon is elected and sees this program through? Will they actively oppose the system through legal or non-legal means, and will they have to scale down their businesses and layoff people just to stay alive?
arkhos
1:01 pm Mon Feb 1 2010
as usual, a good platform that will NEVER be implemented, or if it will even be implemented, it won’t be implemented PROPERLY. come on, how do you even teach 17m school kids how to use a kindle when their teachers probably don’t know how to use ‘em too?
aleck
7:07 pm Wed Feb 3 2010
give them to college students.. i need one. there are lots of free ebooks online! mas madali nga maalala mga inaaral kapag gamit ang audio-books. ilang taon na rin naman kinuripot ang edukasyon natin. hindi naman nakakamatay kung turuan ang mga kabataan gumamit ng makabuluhang bagay
sampat
12:12 pm Mon Feb 8 2010
Dadami lang magnanakaw sa labas ng schools… but damn mag aaral ako sa public school just to get one of this…
quobeath
7:07 pm Sat Feb 13 2010
Immediate shoot down before even understanding the platform.tsk.tsk. this is one of the reasons why it will be so hard to get out of this rut that were in. Kindle is just and e-ink, you just open up a file, scroll and read. how hard could that be. Everyone can operate a cellphone right, a cellphone has like a thousand functions but even three year olds beggars from the street can play with one! The poor publishers will be ecstatic to know they can just publish electronically their creations other than going thru the problematic difficult and expensive path of physical publishing! And can you imagine how many trees will be saved becuse of this paperless book implementation?! People please..be informed before giving stupid opinions! Not doing that, I wont be surprised if you’ll be voting for noynoy or erap!:C Damn!
Athrun
10:10 am Fri Apr 30 2010
To understand a platform means to look at all possible impacts such an action would have as well as the little details in implementing it as stated in the article and previous posts. No one has shot it down at this point, everyone here is merely pointing out concerns that may arise in implementing the project. My concern is Gordon’ s plan to solve lost or broken kindles.