| Chieh on Education / free information Having a polymorphic device is only half of the story. From the device itself, we would reap the savings of not having to physically buy other information units such as textbooks, worksheets, audio/video players, etc. Once we have a polymorphic device set in place, the next cost we need to cut would be the content cost. To be more specific, let me frame an example. Let's say we implement polymorphism with laptops and kids no longer have to buy textbooks. The cost of downloading each textbook could still be so significant that it would undermine polymorphism itself. This is precisely why eBooks have never taken off. Vendors attempt to sell digital information at the traditional price, when more and more people are offering free information as hobbyists on the Internet. There's been a big battle between the major content creation companies and the public over digital information. Look at the debate over downloading movies and music on the Internet. The major companies, for their own profitability, want users to pay for each copy of the software, music, video, etc. Much to their chagrin, as technology advances it becomes less and less possible to keep track of the black market. The Web is growing at an astronomical speed, and it will eventually be impossible to monitor it. It is a fight that the big companies will eventually lose, and information will eventually become virtually free. Although we are close to reaching free information on the web, we are not yet at that stage, especially in the educational sector. Just look at how long it took the educational sector to accept Wikipedia. Students were failing their essays because the teachers would not accept Wikipedia as a respectable source of information. Yet to take full advantage of polymorphic devices, each mutation should be free and readily available. The one laptop per child initiative is a great way to implement polymorphism, but having free information is trickier. To a large degree, we can already today view and download unlimited amounts of information from the Internet. But we are delaying the implementation of free information in our schools because there is a lack of organization and standardization on the Internet. There is no source authoritative enough to tell our schools to use their material for teaching. And the lack of standards is a problem because the schools don't have rules to distinguish good from bad. As a result, although all the information is freely available on the Internet, our schools continue to use traditional venues to provide students with the information. Our schools continue to buy textbooks from companies because they are standardized and well established. To take advantage of all the resources on the Internet, I believe that we in the education system should form a board to organize and regulate standards. Once these standards are created and the contents organized, we could then start promoting the transition to digital textbooks and other course materials. Let's make this idea clearer by putting it into more practical terms. Our schools, both the public school system and our universities should get together and write our own textbooks, and then publish them freely on the Internet. By doing so, we could cut out the middlemen and eliminate the general textbook cost. We could then give every child in America free access to download the textbooks into any device of their choosing. They would have the opportunity to read the textbooks at any time, even if they were not taking the course. When students enrolled in a course, the teacher at the beginning would give students the link to download all the course material on their own. Each year, the board could revise and update the textbooks, in order keep up with the latest revisions. The updated textbooks would then become available to every student on the Web. Having textbooks freely available is extremely useful. Even if the schools prefer to give their students hardcopy books, they could print them out themselves and put them into three-ring binders. The cost of printing their own books would be substantially less than buying other books. When new revisions came out, instead of throwing away the whole book, teachers could just replace the particular pages that had been changed. If we were able to implement this concept across the entire nation, the aggregate savings would be huge. The amount of money our schools would save from textbook costs could then be reallocated to pay our teachers more. All of these ideas can only be made possible if the free information theory is implemented along with polymorphism. Having free information reduces the content cost per copy. By digitizing the information, the marginal cost also approaches zero. There are already efforts similar to what I have suggested at different universities. MIT's " OpenCourseWare" is a pioneer in standardizing a syllabus for the general public. But my suggestion is more global because I would have all the universities collaborate so that the same efforts were not constantly repeated at each university. Of course, this is not something we could enforce without government intervention. We cannot force universities to all conform to a particular standard. All we can do is to increase the awareness of the benefits of standardization and material sharing among educational institutions. In this effort, our universities are much more advanced compared to the public education system. Although we are already seeing universities digitizing content on the Internet, this effort is largely missing outside the universities. Our public education system will cut much cost if it is able to standardize digital information for our schools in a manner similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare. This proposal reinforces my previous suggestion for having a national digital library. The idea is to give all children a polymorphic device and allow them to download any information free of charge. Having a national digital library would solve both problems simultaneously. It would be a public library, so the information would automatically be free. And it would solve the standardization problem since it would become an authoritative source that public schools would recognize. I want to emphasize that this proposal is only a suggestion utilizing the underlying theory of free information. We can implement it in many ways, but the idea of free information is the key. The goal of all these proposals is to increase the educational level of our citizens. Obviously, the cheaper we can make information available to the public, the more people will have access to that information. With technological advancements today, we have reached a point where we can provide free and standardized information to the public with minimum cost. If we provide free information and polymorphic devices to our schools, it will mean a tremendous amount of savings for our public education system. The Numbers So how much savings would be tremendous? If we were able to implement both polymorphism and free information, how much in monetary value would that be worth? It might be helpful to use some examples to demonstrate the scale of savings if we were able to eliminate textbooks. There was an article in The New York Times by Clifford Levy, published on November 8, 1996. It was an article about Mayor Giuliani allocating an extra seventy million dollars to renew school textbooks. That was only one single city in America renewing its textbooks. If we multiply that amount by every district in the United States, we would get a pretty good idea about the general magnitude of dollars spent on textbooks. And this amount is only for the public school system. We have not even counted the textbook cost for universities. Anyone who has ever attended universities in America would agree that the cost of textbooks is simply ridiculous. Sometimes professors write their own textbooks and mandate that their students buy their hundred dollar textbooks. Other times, publishers release new editions with very few content changes. By making these updates, publishers force students to buy the newer and more expensive editions. This is simply an artificial price hike with very little value added. In other words, the publishing companies are simply ripping our kids off. We can hear the complaints everywhere, and yet our schools continue with the status quo. The college textbook industry itself is roughly a $7.8 billion1 sector as of the year of 2005. No wonder college education is becoming less and less affordable. This is how much we Americans are spending just on college textbooks. In the end, this is simply not working. The current approach doesn't make any sense unless you are the one selling the books. If we as a society are serious about cutting education's cost, we need to rethink how we distribute information. There was a time when the only medium was word of mouth. Eventually, writing was invented so people could copy books by hand to distribute the information. Then came the printing press that we still use today in our schools. Observe that each advancement greatly increased the efficiency of information transfer while reducing cost. The printing press was a great invention, but that was invented about 600 years ago. Since then, we have seen the invention of the computer, the Internet, and Google. There are much better and more cost efficient ways to distribute information today. We see the entertainment industry, the music industry, the writing industry, and the movie industry all taking advantage of these advancements. But we don't see our schools doing the same thing. |
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