Expert outreach/Jisc Ambassador

From July 2013 to April 2014, Jisc and Wikimedia UK are jointly supporting a project to encourage a range of audiences (librarians, teachers, researchers and students) within learning and research to engage with Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia projects. This project overlaps the cultural partnerships, expert outreach and education projects areas of Wikimedia UK's work.

Activities

Martin presenting at the Royal Veterinary College at the outset of the Veterinary Science editathon, with Chris Trace of WikiVet

The project is producing:

• A series of cross-discipline workshops in universities
  • University of Oxford
  • University of Sheffield
  • University of Newcastle
  • Bath Spa University
  • Coventry University
• Public "editathon" events:
  • Women in Science editathon for Ada Lovelace day, 15 October, University of Oxford
  • Wikipedia/WikiVet Veterinary Science Editathon, 20 November, Royal Veterinary College, London
  • Wellcome Library editathon, 26 February 2014, London
• Sessions at EduWiki Conference 2013
• A workshop on Wikipedia in Education and a "Helpdesk" at the /Jisc Digital Festival 2014
• A Jisc infoKit on Crowdsourcing: the Wiki Way of Working (launched 28 February 2014) (also published on Wikibooks)
• Documentation, tools, and advice for Jisc and Jisc-funded projects (which can be re-purposed for other audiences): see the collaboration flowchart
• A seminar for Jisc staff: "Wikimedia and Jisc: separated at birth?" with slides distributed internally
• Blog posts and case studies
  • "Wikipedia: Learning by Sharing Knowledge" (Bodleian Libraries' 23 Things blog, double-published with the WMUK blog)
  • "What Wikimedia can do for digitised content" (Jisc Digitisation and Content Programme blog, double-published with the WMUK blog)
  • "Telling the stories of rural England with Wikipedia" (double-published with the WMUK blog)
  • "One sentence on Wikipedia: a microcosm of information literacy" (double-published with the WMUK blog)
  • "Ten ways educators can use Wikipedia" Jisc Inform, Issue 39 (double-published with the WMUK blog)
  • "Publishing scholarly papers with, and on, Wikipedia" (triple-published with the WMUK blog and the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog)
  • "3 ways to use Wikipedia as an education tool" CILIP blog (CILIP is a professional/scholarly society for librarians and information professionals)
  • "Lets's get serious about Wikipedia" (Jisc main blog, double-published with the WMUK blog)
  • Improvements to the Jisc Guides on content-sharing
  • Blog posts summing up the project:
    • Facts and figures
    • Lessons learned
• Project pages on the Wikimedia sites

All materials created under this project are released under free (Wikipedia-compatible) licences.

Subsequent activities affected or inspired by the project

• Martin discussed his ambassador role in his Wikimania 2014 presentation.
• Peter Findlay spoke about sharing content on Wikipedia and Wikimedia at Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities, 29 October 2014
• Martin spoke at EduWiki Conference 2014 on lessons learned from the project, drawing on ideas from Part 2 of the final report.

Background

Among the many projects supported by Jisc are collections of digital content; research in areas such as Digital Humanities and Virtual Research Environments; and the UK Open Educational Resources programme. Jisc promotes open access to research as part of the UK Open Access Implementation Group and its work with institutional repositories. Jisc also influences practice in Higher and Further Education through its work in innovation and change management. See the blog post for more about the collaboration project's rationale.

Before this project, Wikimedia UK's work with Jisc has included the World War I editathon, the Digital Infrastructure team workshop and workshops at the Changing the Learning Landscape Strategy Implementation Programme event. Two of Jisc's programme managers spoke at the EduWiki Conference 2012, as did staff from Jisc TechDis and Jorum. Wikimedia UK had a presence at the Jisc-sponsored Open Educational Resources 2013 conference. Wikimedia UK's Martin Poulter and Jisc CETIS' Phil Barker collaborated on a help sheet for developers about Wikimedia Commons. In March 2013, Wikimedia UK's blog ran an interview with Oxford University's David White about his Jisc-funded research into use of sources by school and university students.

The overlap

Here is an overview of some topics in which both Jisc and the Wikimedia movement are active. It is not meant to be comprehensive (and suggested additions are welcomed) but it deliberately excludes some Jisc activities which do not have a counterpart in Wikimedia, and vice versa.

Open Access to the outputs of research Access to, and use of, research resources including databases and archives Discovery of digital and paper resources Creation, adaptation and evaluation of digital media (raster and vector images; video; audio) Curation and preservation of digital media Educational uses of digital media Classification, taxonomies and folksonomies Authority files Open bibliographic data	Secondary research data Citation management Geodata Biographical data Structured data (Linked open data/ microformats/ the semantic web) Public domain text: curation, discovery, checking Translations and multilingual resources Accessibility for all categories of user Mobile technology for learning, contribution and collaboration	Open Educational Resources; creation, use, remixing, evaluating Open Educational Practices Students as producers Assessment of learning Relationships among learners including mentorship, group learning, peer assessment Metrics of learning and engagement; including paradata, usage and reusage data Digital literacies Online collaboration (technological and cultural aspects) Crowdsourcing
Development and improvement of open source software tools and libraries to support all the above Training, skills-sharing and spreading innovation related to all the above Support and dissemination of research into all the above, to inform practice

The Ambassador

Dr Martin Poulter acted as an Ambassador between the two communities, with the support of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law at the University of Bristol as well as the two partner organisations. He was employed part-time alongside his two other jobs at the University.

Martin is a veteran contributor to English Wikipedia, with more than eight thousand edits. See elsewhere for Martin's past publications about Wikipedia and his Wikimedia-related talks and presentations. In the past he has worked on Jisc-funded Open Educational Resources projects and taken part in events about co-operation between Jisc and the HE Academy.

Planning and reporting

Objectives and justification for the project, stakeholder analysis and a detailed plan are available on a separate page.

Project reports

• /Summary 8 September 2013
• /Summary 7 October 2013
• /Summary 18 November 2013
• /Summary 1 January 2014
• /Summary 4 February 2014
• /Summary 18 March 2014
• Summary in Wikimedia Education Newsletter, 15 April 2014

Pages on Wikimedia projects

• on English Wikipedia

You can follow the project in greater detail on the dedicated user page, User:MartinPoulter_Jisc. Martin will continue to take part in Education Committee meetings and will report on major developments in those meetings and their minutes.

There was a short overview on the project, with some critical feedback, in the WIR Programme Review published in 2014.

Contact

To send queries to Martin, it is best to email m.l.poulterbris.ac.uk .

Media coverage

(latest at top)

• 29 August 2014 "Parsing with the Wikipedians: Tenth Annual ‘Wikimania’ Conference" by Kiron Ward in US Studies Online (British Association for American Studies)
• 9 April 2014 "The last days of Jisc's Wikimedian Ambassador" (post on Jisc Digitisation and Content blog)
• 4 April 2014 "The week in links - April 4" (Open Access Button blog mentions my open access publishing case study)
• 4 March 2014 Jisc infoNet monthly round-up mentions Crowdsourcing infoKit
• 21 January 2014 "Telling the stories of rural England with Wikipedia"
• 21 January 2014 "Introducing a new blog" (announcing the dedicated blog for the project)
• 5 December 2013 What Wikimedia can do for digitised content (post on Jisc Digitisation & Content Programme blog)
• 8 November 2013 "RVC to host veterinary wiki 'edit-a-thon'". Veterinary Record 173 (18): 440–440. doi:10.1136/vr.f6653.
• 19 October 2013 "Celebrating Women in Science" (article by Liz McCarthy and Kate Lindsay on Oxford Today web site about the Ada Lovelace Day editathon)
• 15 October 2013 "Wikipedia: learning by sharing knowledge" (guest blog post by Martin for "23 things" online course run by Bodleian libraries, Oxford) (also on Wikimedia UK blog)
• 15 October 2013 "Ada Lovelace and Wikipedia's women" Guardian Higher Education Network article by Liz McCarthy and Kate Lindsay
• 17 September 2013 "Announcing a veterinary science editathon" Wikimedia UK blog
• 1 July 2013 Bristol Wireless blog post
• 30 June 2013 Wikipedia contributors 'should be proud' Times Higher Education web site (not in the paper publication)
• University of Bristol announcement of the project
• Jisc announcement
• Jisc Digitisation & Content Programme blog announcement
• Wikimedia UK blog post

Archived material

• /Call

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