Books take up space. They have mass.
Electronic books, however, don't require much room at all. There's no bindery needed to put pages together, no rolls of paper delivered to factories where ink is applied and pages cut to size.
Publishing hard-bound books takes money. Publishing interactive software is less costly in comparison, and an educational publisher would see a bigger profit with e-books.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the educational publishing arm of Barry O'Callaghan's empire, has landed a contract with the Detroit public school system, a deal worth $40 million and don't think that the little fish in the HMH corporate offices aren't dancing a merry jig.
Children in Detroit's public schools will be connected with their teachers via computers. The teachers can use the software to assign homework and track progress.
No more books! A mouse and monitor will bring facts and figures, to fill the minds of Detroit's impoverished youth. No books? The federal stimulus money that's paying for the interactive system allows for e-books, not physical books.
It's a brilliant system, and home computers all across Detroit will be buzzing with learning, with kids interacting with their teachers, teachers interacting with administrators, and what happens if the Detroit family is too poor to have a computer in the home?
Federal stimulus money could provide that as well, although buying personal computers for Detroit's schoolchildren isn't exactly a way to generate jobs for the unemployed of Michigan.
Teachers have to learn how to use the new system, but once the school is tied in with HMH's program, it's steady income for the whale-swallowing minnow. Too expensive to switch over to the likes of Pearson's competing product, and there'll be all those updates and upgrades and revisions down the years.
Barry O'Callaghan prayed for stimulus money to boost sales at HMH, and God has heard his pleas. With the U.S. Treasury footing the bill for e-books and interactive learning systems, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Riverdeep et al. are well positioned to reap the benefits.
And when the stimulus money is all gone, the interactive systems will remain, and they'll be in need of tweaking at some point. So maybe the federal stimulus money does help to save jobs, albeit in a round-about way.
4 comments:
This tendency of trying to teach people over the internet is completely ridiculous. Only people who have done no teaching at all could have come up with this idiocy. There are now even some universities that teach labguaages on-line. Which, of course, is a complete joke.
I wish taxpayers' money wouldn't get wasted on such patently stupid and unproductive projects.
Taxpayer money is wasted on numerous schemes. It's the nature of politicians.
I remember when "New English" was introduced. The nuns scoffed and kept on teaching the old way. The old way is back in vogue now. Turns out the "New English" didn't teach anyone to read or write.
There's a place for the Internet in teaching, in that material can be posted for kids to retrieve, homework assignments posted so the parents know what's going on, etc.
The rest is experimental. But the poor souls who fear for their jobs at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are breathing sighs of relief, so it's not a total waste of money.
In my experience it is more costly, not less, to produce electronic educational materials, at least if you're doing it within the context of a major minnow of a publishing house. Time will tell.
Does anyone really understand what the economic situation is in Detroit currently, as well as the state of Michigan? Take a hard look and then figure out where exactly this 40 mil will come from. Publishers have been burned by the city before and it's in worse shape today. As a former resident that visits family and friends in the area on a regular basis I'm not holding out much hope here.
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