Paper Books Will Never Die

After eight years of writing about past visions of the future, I've learned to never make predictions of my own. Nobody knows what the future holds, so unless you want punk ass kids featuring your dumb ass predictions on some smarmy ass blog called PaleoFutureFuture or some shit in the year 2065, it's best to keep those things to yourself. But I'm about to break my own rule because I'm just so damn confident in my prediction: Paper books will never completely disappear.

Okay, I'm going to almost immediately hedge and say that I can't get behind the concept of "never." Never is a long time. So for lack of a better way to measure, how about we call it within your grandkids' lifetime? Because after your grandkids are dead nobody you know or care about will still be alive. That puts us at about a century out. And since I've got maybe 30 or 40 good years left on this planet if I'm lucky, a century is basically forever for me.

So how can I be confident that paper books are going to be with us for a long time to come? First of all, because they're lovely and I refuse to believe they'll ever disappear. But also because paper books are still a fantastic and irreplaceable piece of technology. 

College students overwhelmingly prefer deadtrees to e-textbooks. In a recent survey, a whopping 92 percent said that paper books allowed them to concentrate better. And it's easy to see why! Your deadtree Chemistry book doesn't have the siren song of Twitter or Facebook calling you from the digital rocks.

Believe it or not, paper book sales have made a modest comeback in the past year. Ebooks are mainstream. But paper books have too many benefits to simply die out anytime soon. 

Paper books aren't hindered by DRM or evolving media storage standards* or a need for electricity that'll turn your Kindle into a nice paperweight when that nuclear EMP blast finally hits and we're all bringing our kids to the burned out husk of a library to show them what the Before Times were like. Paper books sit on the shelf and mind their own fucking business like they should.

Even short of the more apocalyptic scenarios one can dream up, paper books still serve a purpose and will for the foreseeable future. And anyone who disagrees is almost certainly buying into myths about tech adoption that have poisoned the national discourse about progress for far too long.

It's so easy to think of technological media progress in linear terms. As I mentioned in my post earlier this week about the long forgotten experiments of radio faxpapers, the popular narrative goes something like this: First there were newspapers, then radio made them obsolete, then TV made radio obsolete, and then the web made TV obsolete. This is generally how we prefer to understand the evolution of mass media. But, of course, it's dead wrong.

We still have newspapers, radio, and TV. But with the emergence of each new technology, those older modes were forced to adapt-to refocus on the features that new technologies couldn't offer. It happened for newspapers, radio, and TV, and it's happening for books printed on paper and bound together. That's not to say that ebooks aren't superior in some ways. Rather, that one mode of technology has sharpened the utility of another.

"In the future no book will ever be out of circulation," Nathaniel Lande, a New York publishing consultant, told the New York Times in 1991. Which is a fantastic dream, and a great reason to embrace ebooks. The cost of distribution for electronic media borders on nothing. And digitization will certainly help preserve culture, save nuclear annihilation.

But the battle between paper books and ebooks isn't a zero sum game, even though we tend to imagine technological progress as an endless war between mediums that can only have one victor. In reality, it's more like a stew in which each ingredient is being constantly, subtly redefined by the others. 

Paper books and ebooks are each distinct modes of technology, with distinct strengths and weaknesses. They can co-exist in harmony and almost certainly will forever. And rest assured that if they don't, some punk ass blogger will take great pleasure in telling me how wrong I am. Stupid punk ass bloggers.

*Remember all those firewire hard drives you bought that are now sitting in a drawer somewhere like a time capsule from 2002?

Source | http://www.gizmodo.in/

Children in State can now claim right to education

The State government has finally notified the rules under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009.

While the notification was published in the Government gazette dated November 12, the rules were displayed in the public domain (www.tn.gov.in) on Tuesday evening.

With this, the State has taken an important milestone in ensuring education for all children between six and 14 years of age. Education activists and civil society were worried about the long delay in notifying the rules, and Tuesday's announcement was a cause for celebration as key provisions of the landmark legislation can now be implemented.

Notifying the rules meant a lot for every stakeholder responsible for a child's education. “It means action will follow on all important points in the Act, something we have been urging for quite some time. It also means filling gaps in the original Act,” said K. Shanmugavelayutham, convener, Tamil Nadu Forum for Creche and Childcare Services (TN-FORCES).

The publication of the rules also means that all children can now claim their right to education. “Without the State notifying the rules, though the Act was in place, the rights could not be claimed by a child,” said Aruna Rathnam, Education Specialist, UNICEF.

After the draft rules of the State government were published, activists, non-government organisations and members of the civil society came forward with suggestions, some of which have been incorporated in the notification.

These include giving more teeth to the School Management Committee and local bodies, defining ‘children belonging to disadvantaged groups and weaker sections' and providing clarity on school mapping, which is essential to identify neighbourhood schools where children can be admitted.

There was some disappointment, however, that the rules do not specify the manner in which schools ought to select students from the disadvantaged groups and weaker sections in their neighbourhood, to the extent of 25 per cent of the strength of their Class I or pre-school, as required under Section 12 of the Act.

At least 20 States have already notified their draft rules, including Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan and Delhi.

The notification of the rules would mean that there would be more control over private schools, feel educationists.

LOCAL AUTHORITY EMPOWERED

In the draft rules, responsibilities such as ensuring that children attend school and establishing neighbourhood schools were vested with the ‘Local Education Authority' and the State government. But the rules notified empower the local authority to do so. “This would mean that the power would shift from bureaucrats to local bodies,” said education activist S.S. Rajagopalan.

Supreme
Court : Now, you can use RTI to re-evaluate answer-sheets

The Supreme Court on
Tuesday ruled that students aggrieved with their examination scores - class X
and XII, entrance exam for professional courses as well as job recruitment
tests - can now take a look at how they were evaluated by moving an application
under the Right to Information Act.

So far, only re-tabulation of marks was possible. Now, the court has provided
for re-evaluation of answer-sheets, which will include whether examiner missed
out awarding marks for answers to some of the questions.

Passing the path-breaking order that will be lapped up by students, but may
cause consternation among the teaching fraternity, a bench of Justices R V
Raveendran and A K Patnaik dismissed a bunch of appeals filed by the Central Board of
Secondary Education, West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, Institute of
Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), University of
Calcutta, West Bengal Central School Services Commission and Assam Public
Services Commission.

The petitioners had challenged rulings by different information commissioners
under the RTI Actdirecting
them to show the answer-sheets to the students.

The basic contention of all these education boards, Calcutta
University and ICAI was that there was a fiduciary relationship
between the examiner and the board, and hence it was not proper to show the
answer-sheet to the student. CBSE had claimed exemption from the ambit of RTI
Act.

The classic among the cases dealt by the apex court was that of a Kolkata
student Pritam Rooj, who had scored 91.6% in the Class X examination and 80.8%
at the higher secondary (Class XII) examination.

But his performance dipped unexpectedly in the mathematics honours course,
which he studied in Presidency College under the Calcutta University. In 2005,
he got a mere 52% in his Part-I examination and an identical percentage the
following year in Part-II, with just 28 out of 100 in the fifth paper.

Rooj applied for re-evaluation of the paper, and was awarded four additional
marks by the university. But, that did not give him a first division and ruined
his dream of studying in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

On August 14, 2007, Rooj filed an RTI query seeking a copy of his answer-sheet
from the university. But, the principal information officer said no inspection
of answer-sheet was permitted under the RTI Act.

He moved the Calcutta High
Court and got a favourable order. Similar orders had come in
from the high courts of Gauhati in Assam and other places. The apex court had
joined them together and heard arguments.
(
TOI )


SUPREME
COURT OF INDIA
Top of Form

Case Status Status : PENDING


 
This Case is converted to : Appeal Civil   6454   OF  2011
 
Status of : Appeal Civil    6454    OF  2011
 
CENTRLAL BOARD OF SEC.EDUCATION & ANR.   .Vs.  ADITYA BANDOPADHYAY & ORS.
 
Pet. Adv. : MR. TARA CHANDRA SHARMA
 
Subject Category : ACADEMIC MATTERS - MATTERS RELATING TO WITH-HOLDING/CANCELLATION OF RESULTS, EVALUATION OF MARKS, EXPULSION OF STUDENTS
 
Last Listed on :09/08/2011         

Source | http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/