No e-books if you download music

KUALA TERENGGANU: The state government will not hesitate to repossess the e-book computers of students found misusing them.

The stern warning came from state Education, Higher Learning, Science, Technology and Human Resources Committee chairman Ahmad Razif Abd Rahman following five reports of students downloading songs as well as unsavoury material to their computer notebooks.

Ahmad said teachers and executive information officers (EIOs) would monitor the students. EIOs are responsible for problems related to the e-books.

The state, he said, would withhold the laptops from the students for a specific period and would look into methods to punish the repeat offenders.

"We did expect such problems to crop up when we distributed the e-books.
"Although the situation is not critical with only five cases among the over 12,000 e-books distributed to date, we want to nip the trend in the bud.

"We are confident of overcoming this problem," he said yesterday.

Ahmad was speaking to reporters after receiving a cheque for RM30,000 from HSBC Amanah Takaful (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd for the "Didik UPSR" programme at Wisma Darul Iman.

The e-book programme, reputed to be the first of its kind in the country, is aimed at giving information and communication technology exposure to students as well as to lighten their schoolbags.

The Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka provides the digital textbooks installed in the laptops.

The 1.1kg e-book is installed with a complete school syllabus and religious study programs such as Muqaddam and Quran.

Each laptop is powered by an Intel Atom processor and 512MB of RAM and a 4GB hard disk.

It is sold to the state government at RM999 each, inclusive of the digital textbooks and a one-year warranty.

Ahmad said there were 335 vacancies for EIOs. Currently the state has 165 such officers and hopes to have 500 by the year-end.NST