I'm very surprised no one has responded to your question. In spite of the image of a young child "cuddled up" to a laptop perusing Wikipeida, I find it much easier to visualize that child cuddled up to a book with lots of pictures and age appropriate text. What age group are we talking about giving access to Wikipedia? There is a little discussion about creating Wikipedia for kids at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Childrens'_Wikipedia that raises some very gook points.
This computer-only argument is the same one that is put forward by politicians trying to cut funding to libraries, "All you need is computers." I'll bet these guys have never tried to scan a 10 page article, let alone an entire book. As we all know, the Guttenberg project and now Google, with their various academic partnerships, have a vision of doing just that beginning with public domain works. Mostly that means a lot of pretty old material, not discounting the classics, but what about new protected materials? And copyright laws vary from country to country, which is what makes it so tricky to provide access world wide. Are these children going to be expected to read entire books on screen? Are they intending to print them out? In black and white or color? I'll bet the computer-only group has never tried to research a topic entirely on the web either. Teaching kids to evaluate websites is great, but when you've exhausted the reliable web resources, often you still come up darn short. The bottom line is that the overwhelming body of the world's knowledge is still in print, not electronic, format. I'm not discounting the value of technology in bringing prosperity to the most vulnerable of earth's inhabitants, but I hope the Thai caretaker Prime Minister is persuaded not to abandon books and other print resources in the process. Carolyn ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Carolyn Riddle Big Bend Community College Library 7662 Chanute Street Moses Lake, Wa 98837 509-793-2356 509-762-2402 FAX -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 8:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [DDN] Wikipedia replacing books? While we're debating the Wikipedia as part of the One Laptop Per Child project, might I wonder if you would be pro-Wikipedia if you knew it would replace books in schools? Last week, Thailand's Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced his country will test 530 laptop prototypes in October and November. In the press releases Prime Minister Thaksin is quoted as saying: "Each elementary school child will receive a computer that the government will buy for them, free of charge, instead of books, because books will be found and can be read on computers'' Am I the only one who thinks that its crazy to exclude books, the traditional source of knowledge for the last thousand years or so, for flashy new & untested laptops, even if they have the Wikipedia? http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/olpc_news/olpc_to_replace_book.html Wayan wayan at olpcnews.com http://www.olpcnews.com _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
