Expert outreach/Jisc Ambassador/Research impact and open education

"Wikimedia: linking research impact and open education" is a series of workshops given by Martin Poulter from October 2013 to March 2014 as part of the Wikimedia UK/Jisc collaboration. These will usually be given as part of an institution's existing teaching innovation seminar, or elearning seminar.

The intended outcomes of the workshops are:

1. a raised awareness among academics of Wikimedia, its different projects, and its relevance to their own goals as educators and researchers
2. a growing list of academic contacts who are interested in engaging with Wikipedia as educators and/or researchers, and who have realistic expectations about the opportunities and pitfalls.

This effort will be supported with case studies and other media, which will be linked from this page.

Contact Martin via martin.poulterwikimedia.org.uk to request a workshop in your own institution, or with any other query about this series of workshops.

Certificate issued by Oxford University IT Services for participation in the first workshop

Abstract

Wikipedia does not just aim to provide free knowledge to everyone in the world: it actively invites everyone to contribute. It sees the public not just as recipients but as potential creators and remixers of its text, images and other media. At the same time, it seeks credibility and expects to cite the most reliable sources in each subject. Educational assignments on Wikipedia, or its sister sites, are a chance for students to experience publication and to create their own educational materials. Dozens of universities are now setting assignments in which students improve Wikipedia, in effect creating their own textbook.

With a mix of activities, this workshop will show how learners are already creating and remixing material within Wikipedia, and take participants through some of the steps in designing an educational activity around the research resources in their subject area. It will look at specific examples, and realistically set out the advantages and pitfalls.

No previous experience of wiki editing is assumed.

Locations and dates

• University of Oxford, 15 October 2013 14 attendees
• EduWiki Conference 2013
• University of Sheffield (hosted by Humanities Research Institute), 14 November 2013
• University of Newcastle, 3 December 2013
• Bath Spa University, 23 January 2014
• University of Bath, date TBC
• Imperial College, London (hosted by medical faculty), date TBC
• Others to be confirmed: the project plan specifies six academic-facing events, but the demand is such that more will probably happen.

Coverage and reactions

• "Wikipedia: Learning by Sharing Knowledge" (guest post on Bodleian Libraries' 23 Things blog)

Reflections and lessons learned

Oxford

• It feels like it was a good first attempt. Some in-person feedback was extremely good and there was clearly some enthusiasm generated for further work. There are definitely aspects that should be changed now that it has been tested in a "live fire" situation.
• Audience was ideal for this project: many geeky but not tech-geeky; some academics, some elearning/support staff, at least one museum staff
• Audience had a very informed and nuanced understanding of Wikipedia compared to audiences I'm used to; less so of how it fits into the group of Wikimedia projects, so they did learn new things.
  • One exception to this was quality: learning that Wikipedia has different quality ratings, and actually demanding review processes, significantly changed the perception of Wikipedia for at least one audience member. I had an exercise connected to this, but didn’t explain the topic as thoroughly as I normally do. In future I will spend a bit more time on the basics of Wikipedia's quality review processes.
• Everybody contributed. Framing a problem and then asking for each person’s perspective on it was a useful exercise and everybody had something interesting to say.
• Energy in the room was hard to maintain over a 3 hour session. There was a point in a middle where the energy definitely sagged, and this suggests that what I was talking about at that point wasn't as interesting as I thought it was.
• The different examples I talked about maybe didn't cohere into a narrative. I could perhaps make a virtue of this by presenting a “menu” of different engagement opportunities and asking the audience which they want to discuss.
• Although the goals of the workshop were detailed in the publicity and first few minutes of the talk were scene-setting, it would have been good to have clear learning goals set out at the start and to revisit these
• I thought I was presenting Wikimedia in terms of the opportunities offered to academic or librarian contributors, yet one of the questions was "I can see what I can do for Wikimedia, but what can Wikimedia do for me?" so I need to strengthen that point.
• Oxford has a regulation that any material assessed for a degree must exist on paper, not be purely electronic. This presents a difficulty for directly assessing Wikipedia contributions, but we discussed some ways around this.
• For my handouts, it wasn't obvious which was the "front" and which was the "back".

Resources

• Manypedia turned out to be a very suitable tool because it allowed them to investigate and ask questions rather than merely reading/watching.
• Confusing organisation of the Outreach wiki didn’t help. There is an "Education" page, but it's not the page that you get when you click on "Education" in the navigation bar. Note: This has been fed back very strongly to Rod Dunican at the Foundation.
• Finding the uses of a Commons file was not at all obvious to newcomers, particularly the fact that once you click on a thumbnail in Wikipedia, you must click again on the “description page” link to be taken to another page that looks almost identical to the one you were just on.

EduWiki

• Not the standard workshop approach, because I had to fit into the conference format, but managed to work sections of the workshop into 1) an opening overview about the crowdsourcing approach; 2) a session explaining Wikimedia as an ecosystem linking research impact, free culture, and open education; 3) a brainstorm about the practicalities of Wikipedia educational assignments, and 4) a "prescription pad" session where people commit to (and request support for) specific actions they are going to take.
• Lots of verbal feedback to the effect that the format was engaging, and that I was talking about stuff that was new to the audience. Will wait for ocnference feedback to see if my sessions are mentioned in particular.
• I still need to summarise in one line the goals or conclusions of each section so that everyone sees the overaching point and not just the facts supporting it.

Sheffield

• 27 in audience (two Humanities Research Institute staff plus 25 sign-ups from across the university). Didn't get exact numbers for gender, but women were somewhat in the majority.
  • One audience member said he would have to leave early, but in fact 7 or 8 left before the end and so missed the last 20-30 minutes. So I didn't get evaluation forms or prescription forms from these.
• Diverse roles of audience: based on a show of hands, a handful of lecturers, a handful of non-teaching researchers, several librarians, about a dozen Masters-level students in relevant topics such as public engagement or digital librarianship.
• About ten of the audience had edited Wikipedia in the past. I asked if they had "bad experiences" (like having material deleted) or "good experiences". Some response to "good"; no response to "bad".
• Two hours was just the right length for a session that isn't in a computer room, where there are fewer opportunities for online activities.
• Even though it wasn't a computer room, a great majority of the audience had mobile devices that could access Wikipedia, so we did manage to have an activity where we looked at featured articles, although the instructions for those on smartphones had to differ from those on laptops.
  • One participant- a psychology lecturer - was surprised at how few FAs there were in psychology compared to other subjects.
  • The FA exercise made Wikiprojects tangible: we could show that the Talk page of a FA was badged with relevant Wikiprojects.
• Having changed around the order of the slides, the first two-thirds of the workshop flowed much better and made more sense. The latter third, about educational assignments, made less sense and maybe the information in the slides was less relevant for this audience which had relatively few educators.
• One of the audience was a former schoolteacher and was interested in how to encourage a critical understanding of Wikipedia rather than the excessive reliance that school learners normally show. I hadn't prepared much about this for the workshop, but had a lot to say about it (talking about the virtue of open publishing and some of the ways of "lifting up the bonnet" on a Wikipedia article). In fact this topic oould be a workshop in itself, or a big chunk of one.
• People appreciate freebies (badges and booklets)!

This page has been created as part of the 2013-14 partnership between Jisc and Wikimedia UK