Image from the British Library who have generously digitised the archive of Spare Rib. http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib. Some of it even as OER. This is the cover of Issue 199. Please contact copyright@bl.uk
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.
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.
Dermatome man, early twentieth century. (c) University of Edinburgh https://www.flickr.com/photos/crcedinburgh/23707548313/in/album-72157661120362394/ CC BY-SA 2.0
“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.
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!”
Do you want to learn how to write for the world’s largest encyclopeadia? Do you want to make knowledge available for the whole world to share? Do you like eating biscuits, meeting new people and having fun?
Building on the tremendous success of last year’s Innovative Learning Week Wikipedia editing extravaganza, we invite all to once again come along and join in.
The focus of this years’ event will be on the History of Medicine. You don’t need to know anything about the subject to participate. Suggestions of topics to create or edit, along with supporting resources will be available, and training will be provided by a professional Wikimedian. If you have a laptop or tablet, please bring it along.
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.
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
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.
“Nighthawks by Edward Hopper 1942” by Edward Hopper Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nighthawks_by_Edward_Hopper_1942.jpg
‘because it will gather together all the mixed up multitude of video material from all over the University; bring it into one place; channel it into our VLEs, websites, portals and courses; apply standards and metadata ; and be very cool’.
You will know the following definitions of hopper:
hopper ( agric) : a container for a loose bulk material.
hopper ( minecraft ): a block that can be used to catch item entities, or to transfer items into and out of other containers.
channel-hopper( tv) : quickly changing from one channel to another to find something you want to watch.
Grace Hopper ( rolemodel) : an inspirational computer scientist. She developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components and coined the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches when she removed a moth from her computer.
Dennis Hopper (role model): just cool.
space hopper ( toy ): just orange and bouncy.
Handling your hopper
We plan to launch Media Hopper in pilot form before Christmas. In practical terms this means that whilst the service will be available for everyone to use, there will only be a basic set of help materials available, and no supporting training courses. We realise that there are a number of staff around the institution who are very experienced users of media and we want to make the service available to this early adopter community as quickly as possible. If you are a less experienced user of media, we invite you to take a look and send us your feedback, but if you plan to use it for core teaching and learning activities, we would advise you to wait until more support is available.
The project team will continue to work on the service over early 2016, expanding support materials, developing training courses and finessing the service based on early adopter feedback. The full Media Hopper service will be available from May 2016.
Over the next 2 weeks, we have scheduled open sessions across the University. We’re very excited about the new service, and we’d like to share more info about the rollout plans, as well as demo the basic service and hear your feedback. Don’t worry if you can’t make it along though – this is the first of many opportunities and we will be scheduling more in the New Year.
Search for Media Hopper in MyEd Events Booking (https://www.myed.ed.ac.uk) for details of a session near you.
We are currently targeting the week beginning 14 December 2015 for the Media Hopper pilot launch.
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.
Picture taken by me. Copyright on LEGO Ada belongs to Stewart Cromar.
Ada Lovelace Day at University of Edinburgh was a great success this year. The LTW, USD and L&UC teams outdid themselves. We had a lifesize Lego Ada in the Main Library, and the complete Ada and Baggage Lego set in Hugh Robson Building. We taught students and colleagues how to code music, edit wikipedia, build lego rasperry-pi cases, add metadata, colour-in and celebrate women in tech, all in the name of Lovelace.
Votes for Lego Women Stewart Cromar’s on going campaign to get his Ada lego set on to the shelves of stores worldwide was embraced by #adalovelaceday enthusiasts. LEGO Ada has now passed the 4.5K vote mark and is currently the #1 project on the Ideas homepage.
Picture taken by me. Copyright on LEGO Ada belongs to Stewart Cromar
Social Media Reaction
Our Ada Lovelace Day website took over a 1K page views in the week, with the OER content being particularly popular. In addition to the many tweets from participants using the #ALD15eduni hashtag we had several official Tweets and RTs from both Raspberry Pi and Sonic Pi and messages of support from similar events at other universities.
Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN (covered) By James S. Davis [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsQuote usually attributed to Grace Hopper.
You may or may not be aware that ISG is pumping money into innovation projects designed to improve the services and offerings we make to the University.
We issued a call out to our staff for ideas- below are the winning projects I have funded from LTW.
All these projects are due to complete by August ’16, so if you see the name of an LTW person you know, or an idea you like, please do get in touch so that we can let you know what we are working on. The outputs of all these projects will be licenced CC-BY ( as far as practicable).
A comparative study between a low-cost capture agent and mobile devices -Marc Jennings
Augmented Reality and Learning (Microsoft Holo Lens) -Myles Blaney
Beacons of Knowledge: working with students to co-create geolocated virtual campus tours-Jo Spiller
Build a 3d Printer -Anne- Marie Scott
Developing student digital skills in the community -Amy Woodgate
Diversifying the curriculum with student-led remix and reuse OER- Jo Spiller
Drones: innovative media production -Amy Woodgate
Evaluating frameworks and toolkits for leading Learning Design Practice at University of Edinburgh -Fiona Hale
Exploring accessible Photogrammetry and 3D scanning -Stuart Nicol
Feedback on Feedback -Robert Chmeileswki
Learning Dashboards for professional development- Jenni Houston
Live Interactive Point of View Video -Euan Murray
Self-directed learning resources for spatial literacy -Gavin Inglis
Twitterbot – Pilot Service – Martin Morrey
Virtual Edinburgh Maker Platform Proof of Concept- Martin Morrey
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