After a week away in Pictou County, we were happy to return to Annapolis County. On Saturday afternoon, we stopped at Bee’s Knees in Lawrencetown. Besides the coffee and sausage rolls, we found that there was live music.
The store has an excellent reputation for its bakery. It also offers books by local writers, and crafts by local artists (see posts Local Geography and Wild Mind/ Wild Earth).
Today, I picked up a copy of the Annapolis Valley Register (Thursday, December 18, 2025). I wanted to read Anne Crossman’s last official column.
To my surprise, I found an article on ‘Student housing stock growing’ (p. A4). It caught my eye, with an aerial photograph of the NSCC (COGS) campus. It showed two multi-unit apartment buildings, next to the campus’.
‘Student Housing Nova Scotia purchased four buildings in Lawrencetown and three in Kingston with $6.9 m in loan from the province Community Housing Acquisition Program and $530,000 from the national Community Housing Capital Fund’ (see Gemini AI inquiry HERE and Four-Campus NSCC Housing Construction article HERE).
These investments in Lawrencetown and Kingston to support student accommodation at the NSCC campuses in Lawrencetown, Middleton and Kentville raise a number of questions.
As a retired faculty member from both the Lawrencetown campus and the Middleton campus, my interests concern both technical education and applied research .
- A few years ago the 38-bed residence at COGS that opened in 2022 was designed to support short industry-led courses in Geomatics and Geographic Information Sciences. Is that still true? I think not.
- Years ago, students came from other parts of Canada and also from overseas. Of the programs offered at COGS how many of of the courses require a residency requirement? How many can be delivered online?
- Given the reputation of the COGS campus, the Middleton campus and the Kentville campus, what programs are planned? What is the market demand for well-trained technically skilled graduates? Historically, we had three departments at COGS: Surveying, Cartography and Planning, Computer Programming.
- What exists today (2026)? What can be delivered online?
- At the Middleton campus, we established the Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG). What has been the impact of new technology (eg. drones, Lidar, AI)?
Access to student accommodation is important in rural Nova Scotia, for students and the community. Likewise important is access to ‘state of the art’ technology. The NSCC (COGS) has a long tradition of working with global suppliers of geographic technologies.
May that tradition continue.
Interestingly, Jason Clark is NSCC Principal for all three campuses: Lawrencetown, Middleton and Kentville. May we look forward to a comprehensive and integrated approach to technical education at the NSCC in the Annapolis Valley?
Dr. Bob Maher is Geographer Emeritus at NSCC (COGS) (see posts Community Engagement, Co-operative Projects and AI chat GPT).
Thank you, Edward for your contribution. Edward was Remote Sensing instructor at COGS; before he and Anne owned The Inside Story in Greenwood.
Ernest Blair Experiment 