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from Anne-Marie Scott @ education
All the best ideas start with a good lunch, and so it is with this one. Some time ago, my colleagues Jacky MacBeath, Rachel Hosker, Melissa Highton and I were mulling over lunch in the Art College cafe as to what we might do to … Continue reading Making an exhibition – thankfully not of oneself
After noodling about on my own domain a while ago with various formats, I created a real live SPLOT using the Splotpoint theme to support a participatory session that I ran, and it’s worth picking into what about it worked for me, because I think it worked on a few levels:
I ran the session with Alice White. We had never met until that morning, and never run a session together before. Sharing the slides in advance with her was a way of helping us both and because all the instructions for participants were baked in, it was hopefully really clear what was going to happen.
The sequenced slides element is obviously important for me. It kept me right on the day. Plus having instructions written out clearly and simply was my aide-memoir for demoing things.
Being a web resource it was loaded up by participants there and then and used to support the activity in real time. I was expecting non-native English speakers in the audience so having instructions written down was going to be important. I have a funny accent after all. It’s was the alternative format to me talking at people, and it’s more accessible than a printed workbook as it can be resized etc.
What’s missing? Maybe the ability for participants to make their own notes as they go along. So maybe adding Hypothes.is annotation would be the next place to go?
I got a lot of positive and generous feedback on it, not least from various Wikimedians via my colleague Ewan McAndrew. It sparked a really good conversation about simple and clear resources to support getting started with Wikipedia. What exists now is comprehensive to the extent that it’s overwhelming to the novice (we feel).
Editathons have also gotten pretty popular – so much so that we’re double booked on 24 November*. So now we’ve built a second Splotpoint site and are prepping some “Wikipedia Basics” content to support us both.
* Ewan will be leading Scottish Living Artists 2017 – A Wikipedia edit-a-thon’ in a nutshell at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh
I will be co-leading Lost Literary Edinburgh – a Wikipedia editathon as part of the Being Human Festival with Sara Thomas, Wikimedian in Residence at Scottish Library and Information Council.
I’m on my way to London for my fourth #MozFest and as I’ve already written about, this year I’m running a session along with Alice White, the Wikimedian in Residence for the Wellcome Library. We’re doing a session in which we hope to make the case for why more people need to edit Wikipedia, and through some fun games introduce light touch ways in which folks can get started. Small edits can have big impact.
Whilst pulling together my materials last night I decided to use an image from our University Collections – a 17th Century map of Iceland that I uploaded during a Women in Medicine Editathon in February 2016. Sometimes when inspiration leaves me or my energy is flagging I focus on uploading into Wikimedia Commons many of the lovely openly licensed collections of images that are shared out on Flickr. There’s an excellent Flickr2Commons upload tool that makes the business of importing very simple.
This image was one of a number I uploaded on the day and because we have a very knowledgable Wikimedian in Residence he made sure all the images uploaded were tagged as coming from the University of Edinburgh. A colleague at Wikimedia UK spotted this new collection of tagged images and thought this map of Iceland in particular would be a suitable addition to some of the existing articles about Iceland. It was added to English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia and Simple Wikipedia.
Shortly after this the football World Cup kicked off, and a certain plucky northerly island nation started to do much better than expected (no, not Scotland – this isn’t a fantasy story I’m writing). Ewan our Wikimedian looked at the correlation between views and matches at the time.
Iceland’s Euro 2016 matches were on 14 June (1-1 with Portugal), 18 June (1-1 Hungary), 22 June (2-1 victory over Austria), 27 June (2-1 win over England), and 3 July (2-5 defeat to France). Around each of these events people all over the world were keen to learn about this surprising nation. Viewing numbers ( numbers of hits) show appreciable spikes for the matches against Portugal, England, and France.
On German Wikipedia spikes against each of the matches regularly exceeded 100,000 page views.
The biggest spike was for the victory over England!
Since then, the image has been added to Afrikaanes Wikipedia and Welsh Wikipedia and has been viewed over 10,000,000 times.
It was also featured earlier this in Creative Commons “State of the Commons 2016” report as one of the spotlight features for Wikipedia.
Small edits can have big impact.
(I said this was another story about maps – here is the first story about openly licensed maps and how great they are.
This time next week I should be in London at Ravensbourne art college for my fourth MozFest experience. *Finally* Martin Hawksey is attending and he’s gone all out and is even running a session. The lovely people of ALT will be there talking about CMALT. I’m also going to take the plunge this year and run a short session to introduce the wonderful world of Wikipedia editing and Alice White from the Wellcome Library has kindly volunteered to co-facilitate. I’ve had so much from the sessions I’ve attended in the past that it’s really long overdue to give something back.
Last year I didn’t write a lot about MozFest because I got mugged and had my phone stolen and lost all my notes and photos. It was a bit of a downer. This year I’m not only going to try write something for myself, but also hopefully something for the ALT blog because frankly more learning technologists should be at this event. It is hands-down the best fun, if you’re into hacking, making, art, data, ethics, privacy, the open web, everything open that you can do on the open web, social justice and all the other things that are too numerous to list.
Look at the speaker line-up alone for goodness sake.
Then there’s the scheduled sessions. How do I even choose and this is about 1/5 of what’s in the 10:00 – 11:00 slot.
Okay. I’m over-stimulated already. Going to have a cup of tea and sit down.
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Today is Ada Lovelace Day and this has become a firm fixture in our calendar at the University of Edinburgh. It is one of our flagship Wikipedia editathon days, and this year we partnered with the School of Chemistry and took the event on the road to our Kings Buildings campus. You can see the full schedule here, and there’s event some OER there if that’s your cup of tea. We ate our body-weight in periodic table cupcakes. I personally ate polonium and arsenic and have lived to tell the tale.
As the closing event to the day we had a viewing of the excellent short film “A Chemical Imbalance” commissioned by Professor Polly Arnold, Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry. I had the distinct pleasure of chairing a panel discussion with Professor Arnold, Professor Jane Norman, and Dr Carole Morrison after the film and we discussed the ways in which we can recruit more women into STEM careers, and nuture and retain women already working in the field.
Earlier in the afternoon I had started gathering up some info on Katherine Isabella Williams, one of the 19 signatories to the 1904 petition to join the Chemical Society. This is a story that our colleague Dr Michael Seery brought to our attention through an epic Twitter rant earier in the year (What do you do with a dead chemist?) and since then he’s written a fine Wikipedia article on the subject. We spent much of the editathon today fleshing out biographies of each of the 19 signatories.
Someone else was also working on the same biography as me, so I spent a little time fitting my notes in around the existing page this evening. After that I happened to look at my notifications in Wikimedia, and spotted the following comment on my user page, from around a month ago:
Hello, this isn’t a very Wikipedian comment but I just wanted to thank you personally for creating an entry for my mother Ann Katharine Mitchell. She is in residential care with Alzheimers, serene and contented, and largely lives in the past. She was told recently that she had a Wikipedia entry and was flattered and delighted to see it (I’ve now made some revisions). It isn’t the purpose of your editing to give the subjects pleasure, of course, but thanks for doing so!
I created the page for Ann Katharine Mitchell on 11 October 2016. Ada Lovelace Day last year. Sometimes working with Wikipedia can be one of the nicest things one gets to do.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day and this has become a firm fixture in our calendar at the University of Edinburgh. It is one of our flagship Wikipedia editathon events, and this year we partnered with the School of Chemistry and took the event on the road to our Kings Buildings campus. You can see the full schedule here, and there’s even some OER there if that’s your cup of tea. We ate our body-weight in periodic table cupcakes. I personally ate polonium and arsenic and have lived to tell the tale.
As the closing event to the day we had a viewing of the excellent short film “A Chemical Imbalance” commissioned by Professor Polly Arnold, Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry. I had the distinct pleasure of chairing a panel discussion with Professor Arnold, Professor Jane Norman, and Dr Carole Morrison after the film and we discussed the ways in which we can recruit more women into STEM careers, and nuture and retain women already working in the field.
Earlier in the afternoon I had started gathering up some info on Katherine Isabella Williams, one of the 19 signatories to the 1904 petition to join the Chemical Society. This is a story that our colleague Dr Michael Seery brought to our attention through an epic Twitter rant earier in the year (What do you do with a dead chemist?) and since then he’s written a fine Wikipedia article on the subject. We spent much of the editathon today fleshing out biographies of each of the 19 signatories.
Someone else was also working on the same biography as me, so I spent a little time fitting my notes in around the existing page this evening. After that I happened to look at my notifications in Wikipedia, and spotted the following comment on my user page, from around a month ago:
Hello, this isn’t a very Wikipedian comment but I just wanted to thank you personally for creating an entry for my mother Ann Katharine Mitchell. She is in residential care with Alzheimers, serene and contented, and largely lives in the past. She was told recently that she had a Wikipedia entry and was flattered and delighted to see it (I’ve now made some revisions). It isn’t the purpose of your editing to give the subjects pleasure, of course, but thanks for doing so!
I created the page for Ann Katharine Mitchell on 11 October 2016. Ada Lovelace Day last year. Sometimes working with Wikipedia can be one of the nicest things one gets to do.
Answer (1): Barium (boom-boom!)
Answer (2): Write their story on Wikipedia, especially if they were female.*
One of the best bits of my job is working with Ewan McAndrew, our excellent Wikimedian in Residence. Our Ada Lovelace Day and Innovative Learning Week editathons back in 2015 paved the way for a year long residency in 2016, and that was so successful that we extended the residency for another year. The focus of the second year of the residency is on using Wikimedia projects in the curriculum, building on excellent work in areas like Reproductive Biomedicine, Divinity, and Translation Studies.
Sometimes convincing our colleagues to engage can be hard. Stereotypes about the factual accuracy of Wikipedia, or concerns about the risks that come with working in the open can be difficult to counter. We spend a lot of time supporting our colleagues to engage in light-touch ways that help build confidence and interest.
Sometimes though we talk about Wikipedia with colleagues and they quickly get as passionate and engaged as we are. That happened again this week, when Ewan went to visit our colleague in Chemistry, Dr Michael Seery. A conversation about women in Chemistry, some ideas about Ada Lovelace Day 2017 and some attractive Histropedia timelines went down very well. Later that evening I spotted the Twitter thread below.
This is what can happen if you are exposed to a Wikimedian in Residence…
* Only around 16% of biographies on Wikipedia are of women. This is a form of systemic bias and you should read more about the Wiki Women in Red project who do excellent work in this space.
from Ollie Bray
Updated: November 2014
Love it or hate it Wikipedia is a big part of our lives and its certainly a big part of our online browsing experience. Whether we admit to it or not many people consult Wikipedia on a regular basis to answer their questions. A large part of this is due to the fact that Google loves Wikipedia more than any other site on the Internet. In fact it gets presented as the top search result to more search queries than anything else, even Google itself.
Anyway, one of the challenges for educators using Wikipedia is trying to get students to use it appropriately and really to understand what it is and what it can do.
This Digital Hand Out (mainly linking to articles from November 2014) provides a portal to connect to various thoughts, articles and videos about using Wikipedia in Schools and other educational establishments.
_______________________________________________
Summary of November 2014 Key posts
Recommendations for Scottish Education (November 2014)
Magazine Articles
Video
From the archive:
_______________________________________________
from Ollie Bray
The purpose of this post is to make some recommendation for Scottish Education on how Wikimedia Resources could be used more in Scottish Schools.
The post might also be useful to help WikiMedia UK to focus their thinking on how they might expand and improve their current reach to the school education sector.
All the ideas are pretty rough at the moment but can be expended upon and ‘fleshed’ out if required – some of the ideas are also obvious 'quick wins'.
I have developed the ideas following my successful series of posts (and positive feedback) on 7 things you didn't know about Wikipedia.
Idea One: Wikipedia in Education
The development of a strategy and set of resources to improve the understanding of Wikipedia and how to use Wikipedia in Schools.
These resources might include:
1) Provide basic Information for teachers this could include printed, digital and video (or probably a combination of all three) around a number of themes.
For example:
The aim of the resource would be to have two purposes. The first purpose would be to provide a set of resources that teachers could use to help educate young people about Wikis, Wikipedia and Digital Literacy. The second (more subtle purpose) would be to provide teachers with a much needed professional development up-date on the above content.
I like the idea of developing this around creative Storyboarding (eg: http://goo.gl/8yfRwS) – not only is it visually attractive but it makes it very easy to reproduce videos into different languages (this could also be done via crowdsourcing of the Wikimedia Community).
Now, I know that videos on all of the above topics already exist but there needs to be some standardisation across the style and targeting of a new set of videos if we want teachers to adopt Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) in its widest context.
For example, the video below from commoncraft is excellent BUT, I am sure, the US accent and the US examples puts people off from other (non-US) countries? We need something easy and neutral where we can add a localised voice over.
2) The development of a campaign to get schools writing, editing and up-dating Wikipedia articles about themselves.
Years ago when google Maps was just starting out Google ran a Campaign called, "We're famous, find us on Google Maps" it sent out hundreds of thousands of stickers to businesses who listed themselves / appeared on the service.
We need a similar thing for schools on Wikipedia (and perhapes also for tourist attracttions?). We need to develop an equivilant ‘find me on Wikipedia’ sticker idea (or virtual sticker idea, or both).
I would like to see every school in Scotland (and the UK, and eventually worldwide) with a Wikipedia article. It would be even better if they were researched, referenced and written by the students themselves.
3) The development of a child centered progressive reward scheme for young wikipedians.
There is potential here for make this game based (and to certainly include digital badges). It might work a bit like this:
Idea Two: Wiki (Text) Books
To develop a way to be able to use Wikipedia to create education textbooks for schools. This needs to be a more robust and creative solution to just combining a number of Wikipedia articles and re-producing it as a .pdf.
For example we need to develop the code and an engine that allows an educator to export Wikipedia pages and then edit them to make them more child friendly or curriculum specific.
When the book is published in this (currently completely fictitious) Wiki Book textbook generator we need to be able to reference the original article authors but also credit the authors who has re-edited the text to make it more suitable for school use.
It would also be interesting to be able to combine other content. For example from the BBC Learning Zone.
In the UK combining BBC Content and Wikimedia Content as electronic textbooks / learning Resources would really create some powerful tools for learning, not to mention shake up the textbook industry!
A small fund could also be set aside to commission maps and diagrams when non-were available from sources licensed under Creative Commons.
Idea Three: Expansion of Wikimedia Commons (built by schools)
Rapid expansion of Wikimedia Commons linked to Scottish School ‘find me on Wikipedia’ Initiative. This could be archived by asking schools to submit 5 – 10 geo-tagged pictures of their local area under a Commons License.
Photo: cc: Kingussiehigh.org.uk
Idea Four: Gathering / [un]conference
With an appropriate partner host an informal gathering of school educators to discuss ideas of how Wikipeda and Wikimedia could be used more in schools. The recent #eduwiki Event in Edinburgh made a good start here but a more specific ‘School Focused’ Event in Scotland is still needed.
_______________________________________________
Anyone got any other ideas?
from Ollie Bray
The purpose of this post is to make some recommendation for Scottish Education on how Wikimedia Resources could be used more in Scottish Schools.
The post might also be useful to help WikiMedia UK to focus their thinking on how they might expand and improve their current reach to the school education sector.
All the ideas are pretty rough at the moment but can be expended upon and ‘fleshed’ out if required – some of the ideas are also obvious 'quick wins'.
I have developed the ideas following my successful series of posts (and positive feedback) on 7 things you didn't know about Wikipedia.
Idea One: Wikipedia in Education
The development of a strategy and set of resources to improve the understanding of Wikipedia and how to use Wikipedia in Schools.
These resources might include:
1) Provide basic Information for teachers this could include printed, digital and video (or probably a combination of all three) around a number of themes.
For example:
The aim of the resource would be to have two purposes. The first purpose would be to provide a set of resources that teachers could use to help educate young people about Wikis, Wikipedia and Digital Literacy. The second (more subtle purpose) would be to provide teachers with a much needed professional development up-date on the above content.
I like the idea of developing this around creative Storyboarding (eg: http://goo.gl/8yfRwS) – not only is it visually attractive but it makes it very easy to reproduce videos into different languages (this could also be done via crowdsourcing of the Wikimedia Community).
Now, I know that videos on all of the above topics already exist but there needs to be some standardisation across the style and targeting of a new set of videos if we want teachers to adopt Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) in its widest context.
For example, the video below from commoncraft is excellent BUT, I am sure, the US accent and the US examples puts people off from other (non-US) countries? We need something easy and neutral where we can add a localised voice over.
2) The development of a campaign to get schools writing, editing and up-dating Wikipedia articles about themselves.
Years ago when google Maps was just starting out Google ran a Campaign called, "We're famous, find us on Google Maps" it sent out hundreds of thousands of stickers to businesses who listed themselves / appeared on the service.
We need a similar thing for schools on Wikipedia (and perhapes also for tourist attracttions?). We need to develop an equivilant ‘find me on Wikipedia’ sticker idea (or virtual sticker idea, or both).
I would like to see every school in Scotland (and the UK, and eventually worldwide) with a Wikipedia article. It would be even better if they were researched, referenced and written by the students themselves.
3) The development of a child centered progressive reward scheme for young wikipedians.
There is potential here for make this game based (and to certainly include digital badges). It might work a bit like this:
Idea Two: Wiki (Text) Books
To develop a way to be able to use Wikipedia to create education textbooks for schools. This needs to be a more robust and creative solution to just combining a number of Wikipedia articles and re-producing it as a .pdf.
For example we need to develop the code and an engine that allows an educator to export Wikipedia pages and then edit them to make them more child friendly or curriculum specific.
When the book is published in this (currently completely fictitious) Wiki Book textbook generator we need to be able to reference the original article authors but also credit the authors who has re-edited the text to make it more suitable for school use.
It would also be interesting to be able to combine other content. For example from the BBC Learning Zone.
In the UK combining BBC Content and Wikimedia Content as electronic textbooks / learning Resources would really create some powerful tools for learning, not to mention shake up the textbook industry!
A small fund could also be set aside to commission maps and diagrams when non-were available from sources licensed under Creative Commons.
Idea Three: Expansion of Wikimedia Commons (built by schools)
Rapid expansion of Wikimedia Commons linked to Scottish School ‘find me on Wikipedia’ Initiative. This could be archived by asking schools to submit 5 – 10 geo-tagged pictures of their local area under a Commons License.
Photo: cc: Kingussiehigh.org.uk
Idea Four: Gathering / [un]conference
With an appropriate partner host an informal gathering of school educators to discuss ideas of how Wikipeda and Wikimedia could be used more in schools. The recent #eduwiki Event in Edinburgh made a good start here but a more specific ‘School Focused’ Event in Scotland is still needed.
_______________________________________________
Anyone got any other ideas?