Friday, June 12, 2009

Schwarzenegger terminates textbooks

California's Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a digital textbooks initiative.
"The first phase will bring high school math and science classes access to free digital textbooks by fall 2009 - with additional content to follow"
One of the spins on this, from the video, was "flexbooks" rather than textbooks, the interactive potential. Schwarzenegger mentioned various positives but he mainly stressed the saving of money in the worst economic times since the Great Depression:
The average textbook costs about $75 to $100 per student. For a school district with about 10,000 high school students, the use of free digital textbooks in just science and math classes could save up to $2 million dollars
It wasn't mentioned that the seed for this idea was planted in part by the OLPC:

2 comments:

einfeldt said...

I assumed that these textbooks would be DRM'd and would run only with Microsoft Windows. But I might be synical, having lived in California long enough to recall how it was that Schwarzenneger came to power.

http://is.gd/10gfy

There is also another angle. All those electronic books will require computers to read them, and I doubt that Schwarzenneger would get behind the acquisition of Linux machines.

I hope I am wrong.

Mama said...

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