The Incredible Lightness Of Learning by Arindam Mukherjee

Students lugging bags of books or trooping to libraries? They’ve all gone electronic.

Photo: outlookindia.com/

Raju is a first year engineering student in Chennai. Every day, he spends hours going through international technical journals his college library subscribes to. But he doesn’t need to go physically to the library any more. He hooks on to the college’s Wi-Fi network from his laptop and connects to the library website to access online journals from anywhere in the campus. Raju also has abandoned many of the heavy tomes engineering students are used to carrying around. Instead, he reads the pdf (portable document format) version of the books on his e-book reader, complete with diagrams and photographs.

His classrooms no longer have wall-to-wall blackboards. Large LCD screens and electronic marker boards have replaced them. And Raju’s professors often connect to the internet during a class to explain a subject better and refer to international experts’ views on a particular topic. The professors’ own notebook has given way to a tablet where he writes, stores and if necessary, even plays a video to explain things.

An average college student, say experts, is loaded with a smartphone, a laptop or a tablet, Bluetooth receivers and e-book readers, either separately or built into their other gadgets, and pore over them for 6-8 hours every day. Earlier, the library was where one conducted research; today the internet offers much wider options. Search engines like Google and online collaborative encyclopaedias like Wikipedia are essential tools for any student. Also, with mobile phones becoming the de facto mode of communication, students are increasingly using them for getting on to the internet and search for information.
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Source: outlookindia.com/