So did that title catch your attention? Hahaha! It sure did get mine when I heard it from Senator Dick Gordon during the presidential debate held at DLSU. In one of his answers, Gordon explained that one of his plans was to give away FREE Kindles to all public school students. Basically he wanted to put the entire curriculum of Grade School to College. This is by far one of the boldest statements I’ve heard from a politician about how he plans to uplift the insane state of our education system.
To fund the project, Gordon lays out several options and back-up plans available:
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.
Gordon strikes me as a politician who really has a strong will and is the type that will get things done. I know he is tactless and gets angry fast but the programs he’s presenting are actually quite fascinating. I mean come on… I never imagined a candidate would actually present the idea of giving away free Kindles. Hahaha!
The only problem with this program is that due to the poverty, the Kindles will probably get sold or stolen. Hopefully there’s a contingency for this.
Again, let me just say that I’m not voting for Gordon just yet. It’s just that he really got a lot of pogi points for his performance during the debate.
Either Gordon is a hardcore Kindle user that he wants the entire country to use it or he doesn’t know Kindle at all. The following are just few of the many potential problems in giving out free Kindle units to ALL students.
1. How would regular students buy eBooks from Amazon? I mean, how many middle class families have credit cards (or working Paypal accounts) to do online transactions?
2. It’s a waste of Kindle disk space. One Kindle unit can hold 1,500 books (3,500 for Kindle DX). No student can read a hundred books in a year. That investment is too expensive and it can never be maximized.
3. People who are not used to doing online transactions will be intimidated by the currency conversion process and the idea of buying “non-paper-and-ink” books.
4. Ebooks at Amazon are priced at $5 to $9.99. That’s roughly Php450.00. Still expensive in my opinion. I can buy three or four books of that price from Recto if I want to.
5. I’m not sure if Philippine textbooks are being sold at Amazon.
6. There are areas without internet in the provinces. Managing your Kindle account needs a PC and internet connection.
This is the most ridiculous campaign pitch I’ve heard so far. Instead of spending millions of pesos unnecessarily, Gordon could just commission a massive proofreading and editing overhaul of the books with factual and grammatical errors released by DepEd in the previous school years. It would be cheaper and doable.
@Jojo: I think the purpose of the Kindle for public school students is not for them to buy new books but to serve as a device to hold all the books needed for Grade School – College (It already comes with the free Kindle).
Even if I scratch all my comments above, Kindle is still not a good idea. There are more pressing issues than high tech textbooks in our public schools, namely: teacher salary, teacher-student ratio, classrooms, malnutrition among students, and schools without electricity. We need to address these basic problems first before we can go for fancy solutions like Kindle.
Ambitious idea but what about the farflung rural areas of the country where there is no electricity?
That money would be put to better use hiring more teachers and making class sizes smaller, so that we can put an end to having classes with 70 or 80 students.
All these politicians need to spend one week in the farthest rural public schools first, and then another week in the most overcrowded urban public schools. Then they’ll have a better idea of what our schools really need. I get annoyed with all this talk about technology and computerization, when we have schools that don’t even have chairs or pencils, electricity or plumbing.
The same is true with their idea of making English the medium of instruction across the board. Learning English as a language is very different from learning Math using English as a medium of instruction.
Imagine if we (you and I) had to study algebra in French! Students from farflung areas who are never exposed to English at home go through that same difficulty learning Math in English.
One learns French by taking a French class, not a Math class in French. Similarly, one learns English by taking an English class, not a Math class in English.
Heya Rowie,
I think they need to iron out the details of this plan further. You’re definitely correct when it comes to the areas that don’t have electricity.
Maybe they can roll this program out in NCR and other key cities then eventually go nationwide over a period of time.
Oh, just to clarify. I have nothing against having English as the medium of instruction in the latter grades and year levels. But for the first two, three years of school, when students are taught the most basic concepts of numeracy and literacy, they should be learning these concepts in their mother tongue, whatever their mother tongue is (English, Tagalog, Bisaya, etc.).
Now we know where people can get cheap secondhand Kindles. As awesome as Gordon’s plan would be, most of these kids and their families are starving. The educational possibilities of an e-reader will be drowned out by the growling of their bellies.
Yep plan is awesome but if the poverty issue isn’t addressed then the Kindle will probably be sold or stolen.
This is a very nice idea. Since Gordon’s plan is very big, I think the cost can get down by hiring a company that will develop an ebook reader design for Philippine use with an addition of a self powered reader just like the OLPC project of Negroponte…
Point taken Mike. Sounds like a better idea.
if there’s a philippine version of kindle with a very affordable price then many students will buy it and Trees will be spared from being cut down in making books.
As for my own view. Kindle will help college students from bringing ultra thick heavy books and be more efficient from their work. less stress in weight can help. =)
Having CD-R KING have their own version of Kindle will probably make it more cheaper.. let’s say as cheap as 999? hehe.. well who knows, it’s CD-R KING, the king of inexpensive gadgets with a very unsatisfactory customer service.
cross fingers for a cheap kindle… can be a great help in college.. =)
I think the quantity of 17 Million will be more tha enough for us to either commision a company to do this for us cheaply, set up a local ebook store to digitize all our textbooks and lock up the system so it would be useless on resale once stolen and or if sold to anyone else but the student on which its suppose to be part of. THIS IS AN AMAZING IDEA. IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE. THE FUTURE IS DIGITAL,ITS CHEAPER TO PUBLISH DIGITALLY, EASIER TO ALWAYS UPDATE INFORMATION ONCE AVAILABLE. AND IMAGINE ALL THE TREES THAT WILL BE SPARED BECUSE OF THIS MOVE TO PAPERLESS TEXTBOOK SYSTEM. Yes there kinks to be ironed out in this plan, but the basic idea behind it is superb! Kudos to Gordon! This king of out-of-the-Box thingking is what we need for a leader that can take us out of the dump. And he’s proven himself several times that he doe’snt just talk, he actually delivers..no matter how ridicolously wonderful his propositions are. GO GORDON!
Kindle requires access to the Internet to fully work. Therefore, as previous commenters noted, its features can’t be maximized. Mr Gordon is advocating Kindle use among students for the the convenience and ‘green-ness’ of using this kind of technology, rather than advocating the particular brand of device. An e-reader like Sony’s would be better serve the purpose, as this works like an mp3 player – ebook files in various formats (pdf, mobipocket, epub, etc)- may be saved to it.
As other commenters have suggested, CD-R King or some other entrepreneurial individuals should look into developing a quality yet affordable e-reader using e-ink technology; likewise, local publishers should be encouraged to develop and sell e-formats of their textbooks and other materials at prices lower than print copies. This would also pave the way for local authors to develop more content; as of now, they have no incentive to do so when their income is tied to print sales.
are there kindle readers here in the philippines?