Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates is putting most of his efforts into working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation these days. One of the goals of the organization is to help improve education in the US. In a new interview for the education-based website The Chronicle, Gates talks about his views on putting technology in the hands of students.
At one point, the interviewer brings up the reveal of Surface, the Windows 8/RT tablet that Microsoft announced last week. Gates believes offering products such as the Surface and Apple"s iPad is not necessarily the best way to help the education of students. He states:
Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it"s never going to work on a device where you don"t have a keyboard-type input. Students aren"t there just to read things. They"re actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it"s going to be more in the PC realm—it"s going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.
Gates himself has yet to make any public comments on the Surface tablet. It"s possible he will have more to say on the product as we get close to the launch of the Surface, and of Windows 8, later this year.
Source: The Chronicle