Tag: college

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Kiran has a MacBook Air which we just purchased as both high-school graduation (2019) and birthday gift (November). We did the same for her sibling in 2017. When she starts college next year I want her to be somewhat self-sufficient when it comes to tech support. I was thinking through the options for backing up her MacBook Air, and I realised that a Time Capsule would not be a viable solution.

Based on our visit to the college tour, we learned that the colleges she is considering (Oberlin, Smith, Mount Holyoke, etc.) provide campus-wide W-Fi. There are no Ethernet ports in the student residence rooms to connect a wireless access point or router. For the Apple Time Capsule, it could not be connected physically to a router or an Ethernet port. It’s also not possible to connect the Time Capsule to the campus Wi-Fi as a Wi-Fi extender.

The bottom line here is that the Time Capsule has been designed to connect permanently to wired Ethernet, college residence halls do not have Ethernet, my daughter will need an external hard drive to use with Time Machine.

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bistro, people, street, brick, building, Williamstown

My son is a rising senior and wants to study biology. He prefers small liberal arts schools in the northeast and doesn’t want to attend any college or university below the Mason-Dixon line. So this summer we toured Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts while on a trip to pick up our daughter from a ten day sumemr wilderness camps in Vermont.

We stayed over night in the Massachusetts border town of North Adams and drove to Williamstown the next morning.

I must say it was strange seeing my last name on many t-shirts and college brochures. Williams is the 3rd most common last name in the United States so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there would be a town somewhere with that name. But still. We spent some time in the Williams College gift shop looking for just the right shirt with Williams on it. We didn’t want purple or the word college. Just Williams. We bought four grey t-shirts with the words Williams printed in white. It’s going to be fun twinning — is that the right word — with the kids.

Spring Street is the main “downtown” area for students of Williams College. It’s a bit longer than Princeton’s Spring Street and has a few more shops but seems to be the only shopping/dining area within walking distance of the campus. Princeton has the advantage of multiple streets.

One side of Spring Street has the Williams College gift shop, a Mexican restaurant, the Purple Pub and a few other shops including a consignment store. At the end of Spring Street is an ice creamery, Lickety Split.

On the other side of Spring Street is the Pera Mediterranean Bistro. The shot was not planned. I was walking along with the tour guide and just happened to spot this elderly couple stopping for a look at the menu. I love the look of brick and the ivy and the sidewalk dining. For me, this evoked images of my college days when we would drive up to Boston and hang out on the streets of Harvard.

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person, pencil, writing, notepad, sitting

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education.

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The system had bugs—it crashed once, and some of the video lagged—but overall it worked well, and felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly by the platform, and because it looked like my professor and fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let my gaze stray from the screen. Even in moments when I wanted to think about aspects of the material that weren’t currently under discussion—to me these seemed like moments of creative space, but perhaps they were just daydreams—I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed vaguely fascistic. Good, but fascistic.
Graeme Wood writing in the Atlantic