A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement compares self-reported reasons for queuing at library charging lockers against a term of the lockers' own battery-draw logs, and against Sustainability's reading of that draw as a proxy for AI-tool adoption.
A term-long survey finds charging-locker battery draw tracks the assessment calendar, not self-reported AI-tool use
A queue outside the library’s laptop-charging lockers used to mean one thing: a flat battery before a lecture. Sustainability’s newest reading of that queue means something else — an early figure in its energy-planning pack for how much AI-tool computing has moved onto students’ own laptops. A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement checks the figure against the students actually queuing.
Dr Mirela Hanke and Dr Sten Okwuosa intercepted 238 students across five library charging-locker banks over a fourteen-week term, asking each why they were waiting, then matched the answers against the lockers’ own firmware battery-draw logs and the term’s assessment calendar. The draw index climbed thirty-eight per cent over the term, moving within a day of every one of six assessment deadlines. What students said about AI tools added almost nothing once the deadline calendar was already in the model.
A locker only ever tells you it’s plugged in. Everything else about why is a story we added afterward.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Okwuosa, whose Impact Pathway Atlas traces how a number outlives the question it was built to answer, said the survey answers were the least surprising part of the file. “Everyone queuing at a charging locker will tell you the same thing if you stop and ask,” he said. “They’re there to charge something.”
Sustainability has not withdrawn the draw index from its current energy-planning pack. For now, the pair say, a queue at a charging locker is the only line item in that pack anyone has actually gone and asked about.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.uovoza.