Nowadays when you are teaching a course at university, you are co-teaching it with Dr Wikipedia. Your lecture notes will be supplemented, for free, by Wikipedia. This is almost always good. Although it does mean that you if took inspiration and examples off Wikipedia, which I have done, you will be found out. Incidentally, the picture is the Wikipedia logo in Armenian – I thought I’d use it not the English one, for a bit of variety.

So on balance, Wikipedia is great, and helps our students learn. I also use it myself. Without it I would not have learnt that vampire bats can run at up to 5 mph – so my life would be less rich. I have even contributed to a Wikipedia page.

So, Wikipedia is great. But I am not sure it is always a good thing. I am taking small group tutorials this semester and the level-one coordinator James Adams has carefully collected problems for the students to do. I think he has fond hopes that the students will think hard about how to solve his problems, thus developing their problem-solving skills. Instead, there is a bit of a tendency to just look up the answer on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great resource and knowledge bank but is best as an aid to, not a substitute for, thinking.