IT and Education: South Korea digitizes its paperback textbooks

The South Korea is actively involved in its competition with Japan for the status of the most technologically advanced country in Asia. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced that by 2014, all of South Korea's elementary-level educational materials will be digitized, and by 2015, the entire school-age curriculum will be delivered on an array of computers, smart phones and tablets.

The country's education ministry reveals that it will spend $2.5 billion buying the requisite tablets and digitizing material for them. The lion’s share of this money will certainly go to national electronics giants - most likely, Samsung, Technology Review presumes.

The government wants to build a cloud computing system in all schools, so that users can access a database of all digital textbooks and choose what they want from their tablet PCs. Apart from this, the ministry also wants to push for online classes for some subjects that would allow students who have to miss classes to catch up. Those students will get their online hours recognized as attendance.

This move also re-ignites the age-old debate about whether or not students learn better from screens or printed material. Equally important, there's the issue of whether or not devices with smaller form factors are as effective as current textbooks, which tend to have significantly more area on each page.

On one hand, the screen territory of modern tablet fails to adequately reproduce a full-size textbook. On the other hand, digital equivalents provide cross-references, search facilities, videos and other convenient interactive options, unavailable to owners of paperback editions.