My keynote is mostly written, I know who I’m going to introduce and where I am chair. I’m looking forward to see you all there. Got your ticket?
My presentation is called ‘Open with Care: contents may have shifted during flight’. Emma Smith’s is called ‘Free Willy’. Last year Josie brought the dolphins, this year Emma brings the orca. A whale of a time will be had.
It was my pleasure to present again this week the ‘abc for sustainability’ framework we developed at Oxford back in the day.
The University of Edinburgh Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Network hold regular event throughout the year, and this week it was my turn. I was delighted also, to have with me again, my colleague Kate Lindsay.
A recording of the event will be available soon, which is lucky, because there weren’t very many people in the room. Kate presented the story of the Great War Archive, an OER digitisation and community crowdsourcing initiative begun in 2008 which continues to grow and thrive. I merely set the scene for her by covering the basic underpinnings of the Oxford Community Collection model.
Lorna tweeted and storified.
The RunCoCo project (2010-2011) supported the projects funded by JISC as part of their Developing Community Content call. “The suite of projects funded under the JISC’s Community Content call are aimed firstly at creating and enhance digital content collections by developing the engagement between content owners in the universities and specific, or general, groups of the external public. Secondly, they are intended to develop more strategic co-ordination within the universities, focusing on the relationship between digital collection curators and business and community engagement teams.”
The outputs of the project are available on the RunCoCo website for free. These include guides, workflows, reports, training materials and open source software.
The content of my presentation was based on the JISC report ‘Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources: The JISC eContent Programme 2009-11’. Our chapter is: Edwards and Highton (2011) ‘RunCoCo: How to Run a Community Collection Online‘.
It is a wee bit disconcerting to find that since the JISC pages are all disrupted, you have to look in the web archive to find it. http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140615013612/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/general/2011/JISCeContentClusteringAndSustainingDigitalResources.pdf
It’s a good read. Jisc at its best.
I find myself writing papers to support the institution-wide roll out of lecture capture again. You’d think I would have nailed this by now.
I always find it interesting to note that on the one hand colleagues are concerned to see evidence that lecture capture will not affect lecture attendance and on the other that it should be proven to bring about new ways of teaching. So it should bring no change and yet bring change. Which is a big ask for any tech.
At University of Edinburgh we talk a lot about ‘digital shift’. That the digital should transform and offer new ways of learning rather than just replicate the old ways. So my challenge is to show how students will learn in new ways using the digital version of a lecture while still valuing the analogue lecture above all.
I have been looking for information about how students attend lectures, and about how they use online materials. Recorded lectures are the digital version of the lecture and are available online as resources.
It seems like in general, the universities are on the right track. 59 UK Universities replied to the UCISA TEL survey saying they have lecture capture systems to create digital recordings, and students replied to the Student Lifestyle survey to say that they rarely miss lectures. They also want even more online materials.
61% of students said they never missed a lecture, up from 52% who said the same thing in our 2010 survey. But 38% of respondents admit they do miss the occasional lecture, with students failing to turnup for around one teaching engagement a week on average (0.9). Those doing medicine or a health-related subject are most likely to have a 100% attendance record (74%), despite their relatively high number of lectures. Those doing arts and humanities subjects are also more conscientious than most (68% never missed a lecture), while maths, computing and technology students are most inclined to miss lecture (52% regularly skipped a class). The majority of students (55%) state that they use online resources over traditional text documents (23% favoured these), with 21% stating they use a mix.
Those who most heavily relied on online study resources were, unsurprisingly, those doing maths, computing and technology (48% used online resources for most of their study) compared to 22% of trainee medics and 26% of law students. Men are slightly more likely to rely heavily on online materials (57% said they used more online resources) than women (52% did), while second and third year students (55%) were also greater users of online resources than first-years (52%).
Only 8% of students used standard textbooks, journals and photocopied hand-outs for most of their study, though this rose to 10% for those reading business and management or a social science subject. The survey indicates 43% of students said they would prefer to use online study resources – slightly fewer than the 55% who actually use this method – compared to 26% of respondents who said they wanted to use paper-based resources in general, with 38% stating a preference to use both.
The Sodexo University Lifestyle Survey, 2016
It is a source of great pleasure for me that in recent years the celebrations of International Women’s Day have co-incided nicely with Open Education Week. This makes it easy for me to find authentic and useful things to do as my contribution.
This time last year I was visiting a number of tech partners in California and the theme was #makingithappen This year the theme is #pledgeforparity and I’ve stayed at home.
I don’t find it difficult to see connections between feminism and open education movements. Both seek to give equality of access, challenge traditional structures and ways of doing things; and involve a diverse community of people in thinking about the greater good. Both also have outspoken advocates with strong opinions and sometimes end up arguing amongst themselves. Nonethless it’s been a fun week.
Saturday: A lovely day doing pleasant writing tasks at the Modern Scottish Women wikipedia editathon #artandfeminism. Working towards parity of coverage and parity of esteem with Jo, Gill, Sara and Mary.
Monday: I ate retro sweets with Charlie and Susie near our #OpenEducationWk display stand and attended the launch of Jo and Peta’s Dangerous Women Project to which I have contributed a blog post to be published later in the year.
Tuesday: On IWD2016 I spent some enjoyable time searching the digital archive of Spare Rib at the British Library to find images to use in my OER16 keynote. I was surprised to find that Spare Rib itself is not particularly well described in Wikipedia, so I spent some time on that too. I added a section on design to continue the #artandfeminism theme.
It seems to me that the big libraries are missing a trick if they are spending time making digitised collections open to the public and not taking a moment more to get a good article on the topic in Wikipedia. They probably need a Wikimedian in Residence.
Wednesday: While my teams were launching our new University of Edinburgh Open Educational Resources policy to #OEPS in Stirling, I was presenting online in Croatia for Sandra. Our policy is largely based on one crafted by Rebecca for Leeds.
Thursday: I worked with Dominique, our ISG gender equality intern to refine once more our ISG gender equality plan and with Sonia, Yujia, Susan and Lauren to edit the ’embracing openness’ double page spread for our upcoming BITS magazine.
Friday: Today I am working from home, fortified by jam by Anne-Marie and coffee warmed by Maggie’s bespoke knitwear. I see that all but one of the women artists we were editing on Saturday now have their own wikipedia page, and Lorna, Viv and Catherine are giving it a bit of welly in an ALT OER-SIG webinar to promote our April conference.
A good week’s work all.
Edinburgh University is investing in the use of learning analytics for course design, attainment, and improving the student experience.
We think learning analytics and student data analysis hold great potential to address the challenges confronting educational institutions. By merging technical methods for data mining and with educational theory research and practice, learning analytics offer novel and real-time approaches to assessing critical issues such as student progression and retention, 21st century skills acquisition, as well as personalised learning.
The University of Edinburgh has a wide range of activities in the field of learning analytics. As shown in the diagram below, these activities cross many disciplinary, organisational, practice, and research boundaries.
The projects offer a heady mix of acronyms, names and aims. Just to prove that anything worth doing can be mapped across a 2×2 matrix, we have developed one to show the spread of our activity and projects.
You can read more about each of them on the IS Learning Analytics Web pages
Led by the Vice-Principal Digital Education, Centre for Research in Digital Education, School of Informatics, Information Services, Student Systems, and the Institute for Academic Development, activities in learning analytics include University leaders, researchers, and practitioners from support, research, and academic units of the University collaborating on a variety of projects funded through both internal and external sources.
*As well as being a Hollywood actress, Hedy Lamarr also invented wifi and bluetooth #womenintech
March 8th is International Women’s Day. We are encouraged to make a #pledgeforparity.
Without wishing to sound parroty and go on about the same things all the time, the parity I’ll be championing is parity of coverage and parity of esteem in Wikipedia.
Modern Scottish Women is an exhibition of work by Scottish women artists and concentrates on painters and sculptors. It covers the period from 1885, when Fra Newbery became Director of Glasgow School of Art, until 1965, the year of Anne Redpath’s death. The exhibition is on now and will be there until my birthday in June.
In a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 15% of its contributors identify as female and less than 20% of the English language Wikipedia’s biographies are about women. As a result, content is skewed by the lack of female participation.
On Saturday 5 March 2016, 12:00 pm – 4:45 pm there’s an editathon at the Portrait Gallery to improve and include the information about those artists in Wikipedia.* There’s a follow up event on the 8th at the University to continue the good work.
People are always telling me that the reason women don’t edit wikipedia is because they’ve got better things to do. This seems like a good thing to do. Lets make sure an international audience can find information about our cracking Scottish artists.
*we created 6 new articles, and improved 8.
We are recruiting a Digital Recruitment and Marketing intern. If you are an Edinburgh University student check out our advert on employ.ed.
Information Services Group at University of Edinburgh is one of the largest IT employers in Scotland. We are looking for a digital marketing intern to work with us to enhance our online presence, and specifically our ‘company profile’ on LinkedIn to ensure that we attract the best candidates and showcase our organisation as a great place to work. You will work closely with managers across our organisation to provide advice to us on how best to use online recruitment tools and strategies and to develop content and stories for our LinkedIn profile.
Use your digital marketing expertise and copy-writing skills to design and populate our LinkedIn company profile which will:
You will gain real life experience of working with a large employer to enhance our business through effective use of digital marketing and recruitment tools.
Essential:
Desirable:
Our Wikimedian in Residence (WiR) partnership is a result of a long term engagement and also a credit to the quality of the UK Wikimedians and their ability to support, impress and influence senior managers, who in turn, shape institutional strategies and investment.
I have been repeatedly impressed by the quality of the Wikimedians and the generosity of their host organisations to help at events. It seems to me only fair that University of Edinburgh which has benefitted so much from our local WiRs should now host a WiR to continue a sustained involvement with the scheme and the Wikimedia UK community. Once Edinburgh has shown the way I hope the other Scottish universities will follow suit to ensure that there is always at least one WiR for the nation.
Background
When I was Director of Academic IT at University of Oxford my teams attended the editathon organised by JISC (June 2012) to improve articles on the Great War . Oxford holds an elegant collection of crowd-sourced and expert-curated content in the Great War Archive and we were keen to ensure, in advance of the centenary, that our collection of open educational resources (OER) could support public engagement and school teaching on the topic. Martin Poulter was WiR at JISC at the time.
In 2013 we hosted an editathon at Oxford for Ada Lovelace Day. Martin provided training for the event and brought several other wikimedians to help. Liz McCarthy and Kate Lindsay worked with Martin to make the whole event a great success and I was entirely sold on the idea.
Oxford hosted another editathon for Ada Lovelace Day 2014, but by that time I had moved job to become Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at University of Edinburgh. There had not yet been any wikipedia editathons at Edinburgh so I brought my new colleagues to the EduWiki conference to find out more. Ally Crockford spoke at the event and she highlighted the WiR scheme. I met with Gill Hamilton at National Library of Scotland (NLS) to learn about the job descriptions, support and work plans which would be successful for a WiR partnership.
Edinburgh University runs an annual Innovative Learning Week designed to enable staff and students to attend day long, or week long events outside of normal timetabling patterns. The first Edinburgh editathon ran during ILW 2015. Ally and Sara Thomas came to help. Ally was very bold and went for an event spanning the full 4 days.
We certainly couldn’t have done it without Ally and Sara but the striking thing for me was how quickly colleagues within the University took to the idea and began supporting each other in developing their skills and sharing knowledge amongst a multi-professional group. This inspired me to commission Allison Littlejohn and her team to do some academic research to look at the connections and networking amongst the participants and to explore whether editathons were a good investment in developing workplace digital skills.
This is the research I presented at Martin’s Wikipedia Science Conference which underpinned my business case for establishing a WiR at University of Edinburgh with focus on skills development as part of the University’s commitment to open knowledge.
This year University of Edinburgh is hosting an international conference on open educational resources : OER16. I am delighted to see so many papers accepted from wikimedia projects. We will also run an editathon alongside the event and hopefully convert even more OER practitioners to the joys of Wikipedia editing. Three of the keynote speakers at the event are from organisations with WiR: John Scally for NLS, Emma Smith for Oxford and me for Edinburgh. Each of these organisations are making big public commitments to open knowledge, sharing and public engagement. Partnership projects with Wikimedia UK is part of the way we do that.
WiR at University of Edinburgh
Ewan McAndrew has been appointed The University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian-in-Residence.
His year-long residency will run from January 2016 to January 2017 and involves facilitating a sustainable relationship between the university and Wikimedia UK to the mutual benefit of both communities.
To do this, he will be an advocate of open knowledge and deliver training events and workshops which will further both the quantity and quality of open knowledge and the university’s commitment to digital literacy.
More practically, this will involve arranging and delivering skills-training sessions which will fit in with and, importantly enhance, the learning and teaching within the curriculum. He will also stage events outside the curriculum which will draw on the university’s, and Edinburgh’s, rich history and knowledge.
Wikipedia Edit-a-thons will be a large part of this; however, there are numerous ways staff and students can get involved and directly contribute their knowledge and expertise to develop Wikimedia UK’s diverse range of projects.
Ewan is based in the Learning, Teaching & Web Services Division within the Hugh Robson Link Building. You can keep up to date with the residency through Twitter, the WiR blog and through the Wikipedia Project page.
To contact Ewan McAndrew, to discuss collaborating together or just to find out more, email: Ewan.McAndrew@ed.ac.uk
During our ‘Creating an open body of knowledge’ wikipedia editathon last week we managed to upload over 500 images, create 4 brand new articles and 56 improved articles. Our Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan reports that:
“There are now some astonishingly interesting additions to Wikipedia which just simply weren’t there before….
Including:
Commemorated on this day are a pair of Slavonic brothers Saints Cyril and Saint Methodius who are the patron saints of data management. Cyril and Methodius began translating the Bible in the 9th Century but ran up against the problem of the lack of a suitable alphabet.
This is a common research problem: They had access to a substantial body of important information; they wanted to share this with a wider audience, and to ensure that it was transmitted accurately and preserved for posterity in a way that would be easily comprehensible. When they found that no existing encoding system was adequate for the task, they set about developing a new one.
Undeterred, Cyril invented a new coding system. He invented a new alphabet. His work formed the basis for Cyrillic, still widely used today. Methodius ‘s name was actually Michael but he changed it to reflect his key research priorities: persistent pursuit of truth conducted in an orderly and methodical way.
How many among us now are so committed to our research that we would change our name?