Hannah E's Public Library

07 Dec 07

29 Nov 07

Have you ever tried to burn a server? Not very exciting.
Not all of them. Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own "Just Say No to Wikipedia" signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia's unverified accuracy and ease of use are making it too tempting for students to use as a primary source.
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- Britannica isn't a viable source for most high school or collegiate work, either; should we ban it for students' own good? And what about textbooks? They offer an introduction to new ideas but are rarely appropriate sources for academic papers; indeed, their best use in such cases is as a jumping-off point.
- Banning Wikipedia also gives it the sweet scent of forbidden fruit as well, and it invites the same sort of circumvention techniques that students have used to get around MySpace blocks.

Instead of letting her students rely on Wikipedia as a source, however, Groom has turned it into a destination for their classwork: in place of a term paper, her students were required to create Wikipedia entries.
Groom hoped that assigning students the task of creating a Wikipedia entry would make the effort more meaningful, since students were writing for what might be a wider audience and with the intention of providing a general public benefit.
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- 34 students in one class and 14 student groups in a second participated; all but one student found it a valuable experience, and many reported that they felt more personally invested in the work. For her part, Groom felt that the quality of the work was superior to the typical in-class assignment.
- The Wikipedia community, however, was not as impressed. One article didn't survive for 24 hours following its introduction, and four additional ones were ultimately deleted following extensive discussion, their contents merged into existing entries. Groom also noted that some of the comments in the ensuing discussions "were delivered rudely."

A new study conducted at a California liberal arts college found that students don't look first at Wikipedia when given a research assignment. They don't even go to Google or Yahoo. Instead, most students look at their course readings, talk to professors, and use their library's web site and databases. Hurrah for US research skills? Not exactly.
The findings aren't especially surprising: the first thing students did was to get confused and procrastinate. Once they finally settled down to work, though, the surprises began.

Some professors have lamented the fact that too many students dive right into Wikipedia or fire up general search engines when searching for scholarly information. The St. Mary's study found, though, that 40 percent of students surveyed first went to their course materials for background information and citations.
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- Only 3 percent tried Wikipedia.
- hose findings would be more heartening if they were representative of all college students; sadly, that's not the case. The study included only upper-division students, which excludes half of the US collegiate population. It took place at a small liberal arts school with an annual tuition of $30,000 a year (not including room and board). And it relied on the survey data of 178 students (survey data can lend itself to the underreporting of "undesirable" behaviors) rather than on observation. As such, we wonder how the data would look were the scope considerably expanded.

Giving the music industry credit where credit is due, the labels have made some progress in the past year, especially when it comes to realizing how much consumers detest DRM. But one of the chief activities of the RIAA is coordinating the Big Four labels' legal campaign, and those thousands of lawsuits have done nothing but generate ill will from record fans, while costing the labels millions of dollars and doing little (if anything) to actually reduce the amount of file-sharing going on.
In fact, the RIAA freely admits that the legal campaign is a real money pit, and EMI's new ownership may be very leery of continuing to pour money down that particular rat hole