Use of Wikipedia for Classes

Where the heck have I been for the past year? I knew about wikipedia, but I had no idea that faculty were assigning readings from it or actually having students make contributions to it as part of a class assignment. Good grief. I was still way back thinking about whether or not they could cite it for a paper. Obviously faculty and students are way ahead of me on this one. There is even an an article in wikipedia about using wikipedia for class assignments.

Why didn't we think of this before?

Why didn't we think of this before? Every year, usually around exam time, we have a rash of laptop thefts. It's horrible. We're distraught. The student devastated. Our response has always been to post signs and more signs. As you can imagine, it is not very effective. This year students can check out laptop locks at the circulation desk. Lots of other libraries are doing this, but somehow we had never paid any attention. Geez...

If you build it, they will come

For years we've had a little computer room on the third floor. It has never really worked. We replaced the computers, we painted the room, but it still didn't feel right. Students only used the room after ALL the other computers on the other two floors were filled. So we decided to give up. We're going to convert the room into group study with white boards. We *know* that will be wildly popular.

We moved the computers to new workstations right by the big group study tables. Students started to sit at the workstations before we even installed the computers. It's terrific. All eight seats were in use by 10 a.m. yesterday morning. This new arrangement is a huge success! I'm definitely glad we did it.

Here is a link to all our construction photos.