Category: People, Place and Work

wor wikimedian

Rosie the Editor
Rosie the Editor

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

body of work

23707548313_7d4a452525_o
Dermatome man, early twentieth century. (c) University of Edinburgh https://www.flickr.com/photos/crcedinburgh/23707548313/in/album-72157661120362394/ CC BY-SA 2.0

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:

  • Anne’s article on Norman Dott – the first holder of the Chair of Neurological Surgery at the University of Edinburgh.
  • Gavin’s one man ‘Citation Hunt’ crusade to plug those pesky ‘citation needed’ labels in articles.
  • Chris’s work on Robert Battey – an American physician who is known for pioneering a surgical procedure then called Battey’s Operation and now termed radical oophorectomy (or removal of a woman’s ovaries).
  • Melissa’s noteworthy work doubling (if not trebling) the article on Mary Fairfax Somerville – a Scottish science writer and polymath, at a time when women’s participation in science was discouraged. As well as editing articles on Isabel Thorne, Matilda Chaplin Ayrton and the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service.
  • Christine’s new ‘Controversy’ section on the intriguing case of James Miranda Barry.
  • Eoin’s really helpful mapping tool of the buildings to be photographed: https://mapalist.com/map/573668
  • Our historian of medicine, James’s work on The Brunonian system of medicine – a theory of medicine which regards and treats disorders as caused by defective or excessive excitation.
  • Mary’s first ever article on Leith Hospital – illustrated with pictures she took herself and uploaded to Wikicommons.
  • Eugenia’s articles on Frances Helen Simson (a Scottish suffragist) and The Edinburgh Royal Maternity and Simpson Maternity Hospital Pavilion. Ably added to by Luise Kocaurek’s work on Lady Tweedale.
  • Anne-Marie’s work on Emily Bovell’s article and a brand new article on the New Zealand Army Nursing Service page which came into being in early 1915, when the Army Council in London accepted the New Zealand government’s offer of nurses to help in the war effort during the First World War.
  • Neil’s articles on ‘Fabry disease’ – a rare genetic lysosomal storage disease – and on ‘Alport Syndrome’ – a genetic disorder] affecting around 1 in 5,000 children, characterized by glomerulonephritis, end-stage kidney disease, and hearing loss.
  • Sara’s sterling work uploading images and flitting about improving articles on Leith Hospital, Edinburgh University’s Women’s Union and many more articles.
  • Kimberley’s work on Frances Hoggan – the first British woman to receive a doctorate in medicine from a university in Europe, and the first female doctor to be registered in Wales.
  • And much much more besides…. including LiuLing’s work on The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on Chinese Wikipedia!”

valentine’s patron saints of metadata

Cyril-methodius-small
By Zahari Zograf (1810–1853) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
February 14th is St Valentine’s day. It is also the day we celebrate the patron saints of metadata.

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?

girl geeks redux

Picture taken by me at Edinburgh Napier, Craiglockhart. No rights reserved by me.

After a quiet time in the last couple  of years  Girl Geek Scotland relaunched in considerable style last night  with a keynote address by Nicola Sturgeon.

Edinburgh Napier University have offered them a home and the Principal, Andrea Nolan and the Dean of Computing, Sally Smith both spoke about the role women do play and should play in the tech sector in Scotland.

We are only 18% it seems, so even though there are no shortage of well paid, interesting, rewarding, professional jobs out there, the guys are still getting them all.

 

change ages

books
Picture taken by me in my house. No rights reserved by me.

ISG is an organisation with a diverse workforce. As the first in our ‘PlayFair Steps‘ equality initiative seminars we invited Wendy Loretto, Deputy Dean and Professor of Organisational Behaviour at University of Edinburgh Business School to talk to ISG staff about ‘Understanding age in the workplace’. Wendy’s main research field is age and employment, with a particular focus on changes in employees’ and employers’ attitudes and practices in extending working lives.   She gave us an overview of the issues, challenges and opportunities and brought critical insight to this topic questioning some of the rhetoric and assumptions that underpin much of the policy and mainstream management discourses. The session prompted group discussions amongst ISG colleagues and suggestions for real changes to move us towards working inclusively.

MOOC disruption

IMG_2244
Picture taken by me in the street. No rights reserved by me.

Do you remember when we used to dream that MOOCs would disrupt traditional higher education? Bringing new ways of thinking, learning and interacting?

Today I sat for hours at a Futurelearn partnership event in a hot room balancing my laptop on my knee while a bunch of men presented from the front and ran over time. The group discussion slots were cut short and when a woman did finally speak from the front, her Q&A was cancelled completely.

I pointed out the notable lack of women on the programme to a couple of people. They looked surprised.

looking forward to a lion

'A Lion Lying in the Grass'. Photograph of a lion (female) lying in the grass in Africa in the early 20th century. © The University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/zi2v84
‘A Lion Lying in the Grass’. Photograph of a lion (female) lying in the grass in Africa in the early 20th century. © The University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/zi2v84

Wishing you all a happy holiday. I have never been so exhausted by the end of term in my life! It’ll be lovely not to have to get up in the morning.

LARC rise

Chicken analytics © The University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/17q3tn
No pictures of larks available so you’ll have to make do with chicken analytics
© The University of Edinburgh http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/17q3tn

I am delighted to be chairing the project steering group for the University of Edinburgh LARC ‘Learning Analytics Report Card’ project.

This project asks: ‘How can University teaching teams develop critical and participatory approaches to educational data analysis?’ It seeks to develop ways of involving students as research partners and active participants in their own data collection and analysis, as well as foster critical understanding of the use of computational analysis in education.

The ‘Learning Analytics Report Card’  captures data from an individual student’s course-related activity, and presents a summary of their academic progress in textual and visual form. However, rather than manifesting through hidden and inaccessible institutional data aggregation and analysis, the LARC offers students an opportunity to play with their data; to choose what is included or excluded, when the report is generated, and how it might be presented.

Rather than simply empowering the individual, this process reveals the functioning of the algorithms that increasingly underpin and govern educational decision-making. A pilot LARC will be developed for the MSc in Digital Education programme at the University of Edinburgh, with a view  to producing a packaged system that might be used in other online provision.

The first draft of the Learning Analytics Report Card interface is now complete, and is ready for testing with Moodle data and the phase 1 analytics. The interface is behind the EASE login, which will restrict access to the identified pilot students, as well as facilitate login information for the data capture from Moodle. At present, the options available to students reflect the 5 categories of analytics constituting the fist phase of development: Attendance, Social Interaction, Engagement, Performance, Personal.

If you want to know more, contact Jeremy in the project team.

speak, friend, and enter

speak
Picture taken by me in the street. No rights reserved by me.

This week I’ll be speaking at:
Texts and contexts: the cultural legacies of Ada Lovelace
Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, Oxford
A workshop bringing together graduate students and early career researchers to discuss the varied cultural legacies of this extraordinary figure.   More information

The full 3 day symposium was a great success.

I noted there were more women than usual at a Computer Science conference and I learned that maths saved Ada Lovelace from being known only as a mad cat lady.

an Edinburgh festival of digital education

Picture taken by me from Evolution House. No rights reserved.
Picture of Edinburgh castle taken by me from the balcony of Evolution House. No rights reserved.

Next year in April 2016 University of Edinburgh will host 3 major digital education conferences back to back. The city will provide a stunning back-drop for leading educators, policy makers and learning technologists to meet, share ideas and present their research. The calls for papers for each of the conferences is open now and the lists of keynote speakers and themes offer a tempting menu for anyone interested in open educational resources, learning analytics or the challenges of learning at scale.

The conferences are: the 7th Open Educational Resources: Open Culture. OER16 https://oer16.oerconf.org/, the 6th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Conference. LAK16 http://lak16.solaresearch.org/ and the 3rd annual meeting of the ACM Conference on Learning at Scale L@S

Where else would you want be?