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Wednesday 20 July 2011

Digital Books Replace Textbooks In S.Korea


Outside the classroom a hot summer day beckons, but fourth-grade teacher Yeon Eun-jung's students are glued to their tablet PCs as they watch an animated boy and a girl squabble about whether water becomes heavier when frozen.

The small scene in this rural town is part of something big: South Korea is taking a $2 billion gamble that its students are ready to ditch paper textbooks in favor of tablet PCs as part of a vast digital scholastic network.



France, Singapore, Japan and others are racing to create classrooms where touch-screens provide instant access to millions of pieces of information. But South Korea — Asia's fourth-largest economy — believes it enjoys an advantage over these countries, with kids who are considered the world's savviest navigators of the digital universe.

A 2009 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-headquartered grouping of wealthy nations, found 15-year-olds in South Korea scored highest in their ability to absorb information from digital devices, beating runners-up New Zealand and Australia by a large margin.

More than 60 primary, middle and high schools are now using digital textbooks as part of their curriculum, according to the state-run Korea Education and Research Information Service, which provides technical support for the program. Seoul believes it can finish the $2.1 billion program to build a single computer network packed with high-quality digital content by 2015. Replacing textbooks with tablet PCs will account for a quarter of that budget.

According to South Korean officials, France is handing out tablets in the Correze region and is pushing to expand digital material, while Japan began distributing tablet PCs in a primary school last year under a pilot program. Info-communications Development Authority of Singapore said on its website that Singapore began adopting tablet PCs in 2004.

But Kim Doo-yeon, a South Korean official leading the project, said his country will have no trouble competing.

South Korea is one of the most wired places on earth. More than 80 percent of South Korean households have broadband access to the Internet, according to the statistical office here. U.S. Web hosting company Akamai said earlier this year that South Korea enjoys the fastest Internet connection in the world. South Korea also ranks first in wireless broadband subscriptions, according to an OECD release last month.

The number of students addicted to the Internet amounted to 782,000, or 12 percent of the total student population, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security said last year. The government, worried by the problem, plans to increase the number of counselors dealing with Internet addiction to 5,500 next year.

"What is essential in digital learning is to promote as much interaction between teachers and students as possible, rather than just leaving the students to themselves," said Kwon Jung-eun, a senior researcher at the state-run National Information Society Agency.

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