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What Kind Of Computer To Bring To College?
Elfan writes "We've discussed laptops in education before and the importance of condoms and lockpicks. However, since its not to early to think about the Fall semester for incoming freshman, I was wondering what electronic devices people found most useful for college now. How do you keep yourself organized, a PDA of some sort or an old-fashioned calendar? What to take notes with, pencil and paper? Laptop? Palm pilot? Tape recorder? Or just too cool to take notes like in high school? One laptop for everything, with a docking station back in the dorm perhaps, or just a desktop? Both? All of this is made more complicated, of course, by the lack of funds most college students enjoy."
A Palm m125, a lighter and a Wi-Fi capable laptop seems sufficient enough for most students I know.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
Personally, I bought an iBook half way through last year. Before then I had only a desktop. Let me tell you, having a laptop with 802.11b on a wirless-enabled campus is great. I was able to take notes in class, chat with my friends, and look up more information on an in-class topic in the event that I am confused about something.
I chose the iBook because I liked it's look and its price isn't nearly as high as a Powerbook or high-end Dell laptop. It also has 6 hours of battery life.
If I were you, I'd buy a laptop.
All the people with laptops stop bringing them to lectures damn fast, ditto palms. Just get some good (paper) notebooks and use a PC. You'll get less funny stares, and it doens't really help anymore to have it on disk.
Software, on the otherhand, is different. Whether its Waterloo Maple (my recommendation), MATLAB, or Python with NumPy, get a good mathematical analysis tool onto your computer and learn it. They will not teach you, but the assigments may very well be impossible without it.
And flip-flops. Bring flip-flops, or your feet will regret it.
Fake-ID is a must. Doesn't matter if its good or not in most towns, as long as the bouncers see something its usually good enough for plausible deniability on their part.
I have an Apple 12 in Powerbook. I can recommend it without hesitation for most use.
It has the advantage of being very portable, and will allow for most things you would need at a school. It can use common college things like Microsoft Word, but its also a great portable UNIX-like box.
Basically it allows me to do everything I would with a PC, but also lets me use software that is traditionally MAC like MAX/MSP and Peak.
Only disadvantage is alitte expensive and alittle hot.
Get it with the extra memory and airport!
Kind Regards,
Robert Ferguson
-- get a laptop with 802.11
-- make your computing environment ubiquitous. Consider something web-based (or that syncs) if you happen not to have your laptop.
-- make your computing environment conform to the way you arrange things in your head. I've watched people turn "productivity software" into something they copy just all their notes, addresses, and appointments into for no real benefit. It just becomes redundant.
-- consider that some things might not be easier/faster/better with your computer.
As both a CS student and a geek, I spend a lot of time in computer related tasks, and I just finished my sophomore year. Before I went to college, I built what was, at the time, a really nice desktop system that I've been very happy with, mostly for one reason: Desktops are very upgradeable (what was top of the line then is still top of the line now thanks to upgrades of ram and processor and such), and suffer fewer problems than laptops. There are always deadlines and due dates, and there's nothing worse than an out of commission computer.
Now, for that desktop, I highly recommend a flat panel monitor, because dorm rooms can be pretty tiny. I have a single dorm room, and with my CRT monitor, keyboard, and mouse on my desk, I literally cannot fit a sheet of paper on my desk surface. This summer, I'm gonna get a flat panel to remedy the problem, since they've come down in cost.
Now, recommendations about having a desktop aside, lately I've really been hankering for a portable machine, especially since my school (Vanderbilt) now has 802.11b access all over campus, so I think I'm gonna purchase a laptop. As far as the laptop is concerned, I don't need the latest Centrino or anything like that, I'm interested in a cheap system that will be portable and that I can use an office suite, a development environment, and to browse the internet, all during class and maybe extracurricular meetings. No gaming or heavy graphical work necessary.
So, to sum up, if you've got the funds, desktop is essential, flat panel is more or less essential, laptop is very, very nice to have (many schools even require having them now, and CS professors sometimes assume their students will have one) but isn't essential. PDAs aren't that great cause laptops are much more robust and powerful, and you're carrying around a bookbag usually anyway, so it's not necessary to have something fit in your pocket. I could see maybe owning a PDA strictly for scheduling, but thats about it.
Oh, and a cell phone. Every college student needs a cell phone, and you'll be left out if you do't get one.
barzelay.net
Ciryon
Most bang for the buck, just get a PC.
For $1000, you can get a reasonably high-end machine, suitable for research (if surfing porn counts as research), analyzing data (yeah, right, like you couldn't "process" that 15-point physics lab experiment by hand faster than you can enter it into the appropriate program), and of course, gaming.
I did have a laptop in college. You'll never use it. Really. Professors tend to talk in a highly non-linear manner, go back and correct themselves, make heavy use of diagrams, generally lecture in a manner not friendly to taking notes on a laptop. And we won't mention the high risk of having it stolen (no joke, those things vanish faster than a Catholic priest at a NAMBLA convention when the press shows up).
As for a PDA, if you can enter text quite a bit faster than most people talk, and use one of those spiffy progs that let you enter text or graphics with no effort to switch, you might find it useful. Personally, I can type faster than people talk, but even with practice, cannot enter text into a Palm even close to a normal human speaking rate. On top of that, I find using a PDA cramps the hands MUCH faster than just using a pen and paper.
So overall, bring a PC, because you will get bored very often, and may even need to do the occasional research or computationally-intensive homework. But in the actual classroom, computers still have no place.
I couldn't agree more.
A laptop would be nice for programming classes, but only because you wouldn't have to fuss with floppies and platform variations. Laptops are worde than useless for notes though. Partly for the reasons you list (diagrams and equations) and partly because you remember more if you physically write the stuff down. Don't rob yourself of that valuable few percent you get from tactile-kinesthetic involvement! Every little bit counts.
I learned to get 1 thin 3-ring binder for each class. I like the ones with the cardboard binding, not the floppy cheap plastic ones, and make sure you get a different color for each class so you don't confuse them in your rush out the door. Don't reuse them, unless you're absolutely sure you will never need the info from that class ever again (hint, I wrote a research paper my senior year in high school that I reused, with some revision, in every English class I took in college). Also, get yourself a good 3-hole punch so you can get all the handouts, tests, quizes, etc. in there too. You can also get 3-ring pouches for floppies and CDs, which are handy.
At the end of the semester I just make sure everything for that class is in there, take out any unused paper, label the spine with a Sharpie, and stick it on the shelf. Having class notes organized and easy to find like that has helped me a great deal when it's come time to finally apply the stuff in the real world.
A PDA would be a waste, I think, unless you already are in the habit of using a dayplanner or something like that. It's much better to devote that carrying space to a good graphing calculator.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I teach philosophy courses. I have had one or two students with laptops (I think it's because I teach at a state school where most students don't have enough cash for laptops, unfortunately). I encourage students to use them, and to bring them to class. I figure: getting them used to computers and developing good skills--this is more than worth a bit of keyboard noise. I have had students do video projects, and submit term papers as web pages. I encourage all of this--because all of this technology is part of what a liberal arts education is supposed to do--*liberate* you, free you (or in another kind of jargon "empower you"). If every college student I taught left college able to write a simple web page (or operate a web design program or blogger) I would be pleased. Increasingly I just see knowing how to post things to a webserver as a basic skill like typing.
The problem, in my experience, is that many faculty *don't* have these skills. And they are scared of them--because it changes the classroom dyanmics. When 20 students have laptops and huge databases on them, then I no longer "own" the information in the room--I have to show students some other kinds of value: like an ability to think, to reason, and to help them ask questions about what their values and where their assumptions lead them in their inquiries. I just see this as making the classroom what I always thought it was supposed to be about anyway: less about "facts" and more about reasoning skills, critical thinking and sorting out the deeper questions.
Bring on the laptops!
Now if we could just find a way to fund them and address the issues of equality and justice (not everyone has the money for a laptop).