Open Educational Resources conference

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Wikimedia UK education projects

Annual Conference — Campus Ambassadors – Student Societies — Schools — Committee — VLE

Wikimedia UK volunteers have a recurring presence at the annual Open Educational Resources conference.

The conference is not just focused on resources, but on open educational practices and their pedagogical, legal, and cultural significance. It also discusses overlapping topics such as open access to research. The conference is a focus for the free-and-open education movement in the UK, attended by academics, managers, learning technologists, project holders, staff developers, software developers, and others from across the education sectors.

2014

Martin Poulter and Simon Knight attended, thanks to financial support from Wikimedia UK as part of its education outreach. Wikimedia UK were listed as a sponsor of the conference, which was hosted by the University of Newcastle.

As well as running three sessions described below, we used the conference to renew our contact with partners such as the Open Scotland consortium and to pose Wikimedia-related questions in other sessions. We distributed dozens of education booklets and also some Welcome to Wikipedia booklets. Yimei Zhu of the University of Manchester blogged "[I] received a booklet called ‘Case studies: how universities are teaching with Wikipedia’ which I found very interesting and may try to do something similar in my own teaching in the future."

Simon has blogged about the conference and his presence. Martin wrote a guest blog post about the conference for the Wikimedia UK blog.

Analysing learning through Mediawiki

Simon gave a talk on "Analysing Learning Through Mediawiki". This was attended by about 30 people.

Editing Wikipedia

Martin explaining Wikipedia's 'Contributors' tool in the Wikimedia Ecosystem workshop

Simon, Martin, and Sara Frank Bristow took part in "Citation needed: Editing Wikipedia, a hands on fringe event" which took place during a lunch hour. This was a free-for-all where anyone could turn up and ask us anything. Fourteen people asked questions, on topics from Wikipedia education assignments to the effect of gender imbalance to the nature of reliable sourcing. On the latter, we were asked when Wikipedia requires peer-reviewed sources, and if Wikipedia would accept Private Eye as a source for political facts.

The Wikimedia Ecosystem

Martin ran a 1.5 hour workshop on "The Wikimedia Ecosystem- where do you fit in?". This was designed for an audience of about twenty, though only five turned up. These included representatives of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the HE Academy.

Since a couple of the audience were people I am friendly with, it would have been dishonest to pass out evaluation forms. The live Twitter reactions to the workshop, which were very positive, have been captured with Storify. All present said they had learnt new things about Wikimedia, even if they were already informed about it at the start. In particular, the projects Wikisource, Wikibooks and Wikiversity were new to at least some attendees.

The workshop has been openly documented at Wikimedia partnership workshop in case anyone else wants to repeat it with a different audience.

Why do people contribute (or not) to Wikipedia?

Not formally supported by Wikimedia UK, but worth a mention, was a conference session delivered by Terese Bird of the University of Leicester and Wikipedian Sara Frank Bristow: "Labour of love: why do people contribute (or not contribute) to Wikipedia articles about OER?" looked at the experiences of the School Of Open course on editing Wikipedia ("WIKISOO").

2013

Martin Poulter attended OER '13 in the University of Nottingham. He gave a presentation titled "The Wikipedia Education Program: open educational practice on a global scale", ran a stall and distributed education brochures. This was made possible by financial support from Wikimedia UK as part of its education outreach. Other Wikipedians were at the conference, including the UK-based academic Phil Wane who gave two posters.

The event was written up on the Wikimedia UK blog. The Wikipedia Education Program session was blogged about by Therese Bird of the University of Leicester and video is available through the University of Nottingham. Live tweets from Martin's talk have been archived on Storify.

Abstract

As well as hugely successful global sources of openly licensed content, Wikipedia and its sister projects are prime examples of open practice. The development of a Wikipedia article is an open, transparent, community-driven process that is shaped by policies and guidelines that are in turn built by a similar process. Writing a good article involves learning about reliable sourcing, neutral tone, accessible language and other good scholarly habits. Wikipedia articles that are absent, biased or in a crude state may be poor when viewed as resources, but they are a great opportunity to involve learners in the process of improving the article during their module. In the Wikipedia Education Program, students adopt or create an article and improve its quality, while being mentored both by teaching staff and experienced Wikipedians. This program has been piloted extensively in the US and is now in use in many institutions across several countries. There have been many successes in motivating students to produce work that seen by a vast readership. There have also been problems where learners have been inadequately prepared for the distinct culture of Wikipedia. Involvement in Wikipedia assignments needs to be planned and structured, and expectations of all parties need to be realistic.

References

• "Students see benefits from Wikipedia assignment" Ayush Khanna, Wikimedia Foundation blog, April 23rd, 2012.
• "Spring 2012 United States and Canada student article quality research results" LiAnna Davis et al.

2011

Martin Poulter attended OER11 in Manchester to give a presentation titled "Wikipedia and Higher Education: beat them or join them?"

Slides have been uploaded to this wiki

Abstract

The presenter works on OER projects in Higher Education, and also in a voluntary capacity for Wikipedia, which aims to bring the world's knowledge to all of humanity. Both efforts are worthwhile, but their reach and impact is very different. I will argue that Wikipedia and its related projects have achieved enormous impact due to cultural factors that are only evident "behind the scenes". These cultural factors, including very high degrees of risk tolerance and individual empowerment, are largely alien to present-day Higher Education and become more so as universities become increasingly managerial. Some attempts to improve on the Wikipedia model, such as Citizendium, lack this special ingredient and enjoy considerably less impact. Universities have entirely different strengths from Wikipedia, but cannot put off the decision of whether they will try to compete with it, work with it for the common good, or work in a complementary way. If they want to be more wiki-like, they need to realise that this is not a matter of mere technological change, or even of individual practice.

Postscript: The cultural factors that enable the success of Wikipedia, and the risk of institutions preventing innovation by taking too much control of their content, are explained in much greater detail in the Crowdsourcing infoKit, published in 2014.