As reported [Google translation] by Turkish blog Elma Dergisi, Apple executives including vice president for education John Couch met with Turkish president Abdullah Gül today to discuss several issues. The office of the Turkish president has also posted a photo and a brief video from the meeting.
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Turkish president Abdullah Gül at far left, Apple VP John Couch at far right
Among the primary topics addressed during the meeting was Turkey's tablet initiative, a $4.5 billion program to provide as many as 15 million tablets to Turkish schoolchildren. Apple has reportedly been pushing for the contract, but negotiations are said to still be underway.
Also discussed was the layout of the older Turkish "F-keyboard" on iOS devices, which has several keys located in the wrong positions.
Apple has been making a significant push in Turkey, launching the iTunes Store for music and movies there in December and hiring for future retail stores in the country. Gül had visited Apple headquarters last May and discussed many of the same issues included in today's meeting with Couch and other executives.
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Top Rated Comments
Hey, I'm a technology user, comp. sci. graduate, and currently an engineer working for a medical devices startup - but people, this insanity with making everything "digital" is costing us the world - literally and figuratively.
Turkey, nor any other country, needs iPads or much tablets in schools.
Of course Turkey is getting USD 1.14Billion in aid this year from the EU, so I guess they can use some of that money to buy iPads from Apple.
http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/instruments/funding-by-country/turkey/index_en.htm
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The general consensus where I'm from is that school is lame and boring, education is a vital part of our existence and its frustrating to see how terrible our system is, how badly it works and how little our Australian government cares about these issues.
I wish the Turkish people success, and hope that from it, others also see the importance of radically changing what needs to be changed.
So giving kids a new toy is going to make them behave?
Day one with iPad at school: "Cool we have an iPad"
Day forty with iPad at school: "Meh, school still sucks"
What needs to change is kid's perception and thereby parenting, not *giving* them more crap to fill up their lives.
Physical books, jotters and other learning materials are far cheaper, more reliable, and proper.
What a massive waste of public funds. They did a test in a British school and so many ipads were damaged, they are far too brittle and expensive to be used for education. Whats the point anyway? Its not like they will move on and get jobs in any area that will require use of an iPad!
There are countries where kids are taught to look after their stuff.
And it's quite daft to assume they would buy iPads to teach kids to use iPads. You use iPads to teach them maths, physics, languages, history, chemistry and so on and so on.