Digital Classroom – The Paperless Perspectives

One such ‘for’ is perhaps education. Education sector is one of the worst as well as best hit by the digital technology revolution of this century. And will continue to take more blows in the coming days. This does not necessarily mean that the revolution of technology, advent of computers and internet are all negative for the purpose and process of our education. I have to accept that there are many many benefits and some of the benefits are beyond any comparison.

One such benefit can be the digital library. I am personally very related and very fond of libraries. So this example spontaneously came into my mind. And also we know the extreme vital role a library plays in education and research. Higher education, especially without a good library is beyond conception for many like me. 

I love those wooden tables, lengthy large halls with seemingly some mysterious endings, darkish elsewhere with enlightened every table, peaceful and cold, too silent, smells of books and papers all around…I really fell in love with the ambience whenever I happened to be in one. But unfortunately I never get one everyday and every time. I circumstantially always lived quite away from the nearest big library with such a reading room and collection of my books. Had to travel an hour or even more to reach one. Matter of a lot of time and energy. That’s not too available everyday. 

Now I don’t get the wooden table, that wooden chair, that darkish enlightenment, lengthy mysterious halls, neither that smells all around. But one thing I tend to get almost anytime anywhere. And those things are nothing but those books. Yes, today I carry a huge library right in my pocket and in my backpack. A lot of digital books in pdf, word doc, compiled html or other such digital ebook formats.

My smartphones are usually overstuffed and overflowing with books and documents of various sorts. So do my laptops and hard drives. Extremely satisfying and useful for book maniacs like me. If someone asks me, exactly what thing in this digital revolution I am enjoying the most, my most spontaneous answer will perhaps be the ebooks. But still I miss those libraries with wooden floors and wooden tables. Those darkish mysterious halls, that silence and peace. Today I do not need to spend two or three hours for hectic travel to reach one such library with great good collections. 

Nowadays almost every big library has opened their online digital portal. There you can login and get access to all those books that you will read. And you can do all these right from your bedroom or study room at your home. Or may be in office, college or schools. Wherever you want them and need them. This is the way the libraries of this digital electronic age have revolutionized. And though people like me do still miss the library, we all have to accept that this ease of accessing books and documents through the internet and computers or smartphones have made much benefit to the purpose of reading. 

But still I am not very happy with this type of electronic reading. I cannot touch those books, cannot feel the texture of paper, cannot get the smell of the books. Cannot keep my head on some of such books and sleep when I am too tired of reading. And most importantly, I cannot conveniently write on the books anymore. I have got a habit of using a pencil and marker while reading a book so that I can mark important lines and sections. In some software it is possible to mark or take note on pages of books, but somehow the feel and convenience are not exactly that same. And also I cannot flip pages, scan through the pages that easily in the digital format. Moreover for the paper books, two full pages are at a time visible with 100% readability. But usually in digital format, having just one full page visible at good readability mode becomes almost impossible in most devices. 

And the strain and damages of eyes, necks, hormones and sleep, etc comes as a bonus with electronic reading. 

(I would like to cover these health and medical issues of digital reading and study for a prolonged period of time in one other article very recently. Please keep following  the blogs and subscribe to Kridha Blog with your email address so that we can send you notifications of freshly published interesting articles).

But still, above all I would say that digital electronic books or ebooks are a great contribution of technology to our education and academic world. Lets see how different sections of the education or academic world are benefited by digital books and documents. And how such a way a paperless classroom can be conceived and what can be the most tough hurdles for adopting the same.

For school students, digital electronic books or ebooks and online access to study materials and libraries can be very beneficial and transformative.

The first most prominent benefit is diminished luggage. I can remember my school days, when we almost carried a big luggage as our backpack. There used to be five or six different subject classes each day. So with at least one book per class amounts to six books, some more reference books, a dictionary and numerous exercise books. I suppose you can imagine the size of the luggage and also the weight on those tender shoulders. 

Similar stories are almost with every school and every student. This was used to be almost a torture when the distance between home and school is quite a bit. Now everyone is not fortunate enough to live in the neighbourhood of his or her school. 

Nowadays, almost every publisher is trying to have the electronic versions of their textbooks. The trend has started everywhere around the world, including even the third world developing countries. Today, we have an economic smartphone, with fast internet connections, a lot of reading apps and software and online ecommerce book selling platforms. So many of us try to avoid the hassles of going to shop to buy a book. We often prefer to buy it online through ecommerce. And often we also tend to choose the electronic version of the publication because it usually comes much cheaper than its paper counterpart, readily downloadable, and easily carryable in the memory of a smartphone or a laptop. 

Thus students are able to avail the digital electronic copies of their textbooks. Cheap, zero weight, and anywhere accessible are the most important factors of course. So that huge luggage backpack can reduce to just a smartphone, laptop or tablet. And you have your textbooks and reference books anywhere anytime. 

In schools the main requirements of books are textbooks. In high schools the requirement gradually increases to multiple text books and some reference books. But in college and higher education the situation changes drastically.

Those were chapters in schools and high schools became books in college. Suppose Newtonian mechanics is one or few chapters in a high school physics textbook. But the same becomes multiple books with names like statics, particle dynamics, fluid dynamics and so on. Even a naive chapter on gravitation can become a question of multiple books in higher studies.

Well I have no intention to discuss the growth in physics information along with the escalating educational levels. What exactly I want to emphasize is the growth of numbers of textbooks and respective reference books with the escalating levels of education. 

So as we grow in the field of education, with that rapidly grows the requirements of many and many more books. Now it is most evidently not possible for one to carry so many books anyhow. Thus studies get limited to locations. Locations like the room in home or perhaps the library study room and so on becomes the only viable option for studies of books. These were the days of the past.

As time changed, with the innovation of portable personal computing systems like the laptop and smartphone, we can not only carry all our required books and documents within our backpack or pocket, we can also access them anywhere anytime for some study. 

This is perhaps the greatest benefit of electronic reading systems which includes both the hardware device and relevant apps or software. For me it is undoubtedly one of the greatest benefit perhaps. Even though I prefer to read a paper book whenever possible and accessible, but still, carrying a library right in my pocket and reading a page or two every now and then is just one of the best gifts of modern technology for me. 

Researchers usually need a lot of documents like reference books, journal papers, thesis papers and so on to read. In the past they compulsorily needed to travel whatever distance required to access the library for their work. But now with the digital electronic books and journals they can access most of their documents anywhere they need. For that they just need some subscriptions, organizational or personal. This is also an immense benefit for the community of scientists, researchers and intellectuals. 

Thus this was a brief sketch on how electronic books, advanced personal computing and internet technologies are changing our reading practices. Thus this is a positive contribution towards a paperless classroom in future. Almost all sectors of students and teachers will be influenced and inspired by these benefits and advantages.

So this was all about reading. Now let us see how things can be happening in the writing domain. To achieve a true paperless classroom both reading and writing is to be made electronic. 

Well, so far I have been discussing reading materials like books and journals. But another very important factor for a paperless classroom are writing materials as well. Exercise books, files, paper and pads, with pen and pencils and so on. Unless and until we can find some good substitutions for all these we cannot make the dream of a paperless classroom to happen. 

Thanks to concurrent computing technology which gifted us very portable personal computers such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. And also.there are a huge collection of variety of writing and graphic software and apps. All these can make your writing, note taking, sketching, illustrating, and such everything else absolutely digital. Many tablets and smartphones come with a stylus pen also to give you the feel of writing and sketching as real as possible. 

I have written this total article in digital media with most parts on my smartphone. So it is possible now. We can substitute considerable part of our writing into digital media now if not all. I personally still feel good to write on a paper with a pen. And sketch something on paper with the pencil. And I still love to write with those legacy ink pens that you used to find within every writing fingers decades ago. But that is a different kind of writing pleasure which you can only experience but never explain.