Week 5 - Michelle Nguyen

It's ironic yet not surprising schools have bad wifi. On one hand, modern students rely heavily on wifi to do research, homework, stay in contact with professors, and stay up to date with their assignments. For better or for worse, the internet has become a mainstay in education. It's a great resource for spreading information but it also chains us to our laptops and to wifi hotspots. There is also questionable health effects; I would think it is also indirectly affecting how often we harm our eyes by looking at screens. Schools, being the location of education, SHOULD have strong wifi so that our learning is not hindered, however that is often not the case. It is understandable that wifi is bad in schools, though, because there are so many people trying to log in at the same time. Though I'm not an expert at technology, I imagine it must require a lot of power to support a router that is catering to so many people. Not only that, but it must be a wifi signal strong enough to spread long distances. Most college campuses have a lot of distance in between buildings. As a student, this distance is often a dead zone where wifi is weak and especially unreliable. Thus, you can see many students huddling by buildings when outside rather than in the middle of, say, the quad. Why don’t universities have the technology to support their students? Money. Technology can be expensive and for large schools it must require a large budget to update their technology. My question is: Why aren’t schools putting more money into technology? A couple speculations are that they prefer to keep their profits high and so they do not feel that it’s worth it to spend money on technology that is ever changing. Despite this, I do recognize that some universities are slowly trying and that it takes time to fully update a system. I would find it interesting, next, to analyze whether it’s worth it that our education is going in this direction that relies on technology.

References:
Brian Spero. “Is Wi- Fi in Schools Safe?: Putting EMF Exposure on Your Radar of Potential Health Risks.”

Cindy Russell. “Wi- Fi in the Schools: Are We Playing IT Safe With Our Students.”

Media:
http://www.emfguru.co.uk/wifi%20in%20schools.html