Technology Bookworm, Bye Bye...

Picture this. Right across the street there is a school where your kids go to

study. A student walks in and his attendance is automatically registered. He is

not carrying any heavy, book-infested bags, just an interactive education pocket

device. He logs on to the school’s wireless network to see if there are any

announcements.

He checks the enrollment list in the much-needed paleontology class. He’s

been on the waiting list for a week. Woah! A place has finally opened up. An

e-mail to the instructor enables him to enroll on the spot. All he now needs to

do is visit the professor’s campus Website to download the assigned reading

list. An electronic jump to the online campus bookstore lets him reserve the

textbooks. His schedule for the new semester is complete. His first class is

Physics, where he uses his PDA to take notes as the class progresses. The

teacher refers to a well-respected physics guide. A quick scan of the library’s

online catalog verifies that the book is available.

We are not talking about 2025 AD. This could just be the scenario in many

Indian schools in another five years, thanks to a Delhi-based firm, Educomp

Datamatics. Educomp has developed the world’s first wireless handheld

interactive education terminal for schools under the brand name LearningMate.

Recently launched at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) at

Chicago, USA, this portable terminal allows students in a campus to be connected

to the school’s wireless LAN. This allows curriculum content to be streamed

into the classroom and enables student interaction with the content.

"The education system is in a mess," says Shantanu Prakash,

director, Educomp Datamatics bluntly. With LearningMate, student evaluation

(which takes place every hour) is analyzed by the evaluation server, which

reports back to the school administration and parents."If a student has not

understood a lecture, he can be attended to the next day rather than after 3

months" explains Prakash.

Educomp hopes to sell .5 million units of PDAs in the US and50,000 units in

the Indian market. It’s US subsidiary, Dallas-based Edumatics Corp is in the

final phase of talks with districts such as Milwaukee to implement this PDA

system in all schools under that jurisdiction.

Talks are on with Indian schools as well. Prakash is banking on the hope that

the PDA will perform well in India and prices drop.

Other than the cost factor there are other obstacles as well. "If

children have constant access to the Net they would have the freedom to visit

all sorts of Websites, and that too within their school premises," worries

Nitin Trigunayat, father of a twelve-year-old. That could be a problem, admits

Prakash, but the school network would have control over the Websites that the

students visit. "This is not a case of an external ISP interacting with the

student PDAs. The schools can filter what the students see."

There are some who may think this to be a remarkable change in the way

students are educated. But Educomp insists that the company does not expect to

sweep the education system clean of books. Perhaps they know that such change in

a country where most teachers don’t even know how to operate a computer will

take time.

Meghna Sharma In New Delhi