Supporting the University of Edinburgh's commitments to digital skills, information literacy, and sharing knowledge openly

Tag: Chris Harlow

Teaching with Wikipedia – how to get started (an Edinburgh University case study)

Wikipedia is much more straightforward using the new Visual Editor interface which makes editing Wikipedia now as easy as using Microsoft Word. Students can be taught how to edit in approximately 60 minutes and thereafter can research and write, with academic rigour, brand new Wikipedia articles.

The video interview provided by the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Chris Harlow illustrates  the Wikipedia research session he ran in September 2015.

Dr. Chris Harlow - Reproductive Biology (University of Edinburgh)

Dr. Chris Harlow – Reproductive Biology (University of Edinburgh)

A practical example of engaging with Wikipedia in teaching and learning – watch Dr. Chris Harlow speak about his recent experiences introducing Wikipedia to his 3rd year Honours students to researching & writing a Wikipedia article.

Teaching with Wikipedia – Dr. Chris Harlow (Reproductive Biology research session)

Duration: (7:09)
User: Ewan McAndrew – Added: 03/06/16

YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIHlOWxepoc

Some additional resources & recent examples of approaches to teaching with Wikipedia are detailed here:

1.    Teaching with Wikipedia (University of Edinburgh examples)

2.    How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool (PDF)

3.    Wikipedia Education Program – Case Studies: How universities are teaching with Wikipedia (PDF)

If you would like to know more about how Wikipedia fits in with academia then these recent articles make very compelling reading:

1.    Wikipedia 15 and education

2.    Wikipedia the digital gateway to academic research

The project page for the residency with details on upcoming events is located here: Wikipedia: University of Edinburgh and the latest Wikipedia training session (30th June 2016) is available to book here: bit.ly/1UdQ4f6

Further video tutorials can be found on the Wikimedian in Residence Youtube channel here.

Further examples of Teaching with Wikipedia include:

Making use of Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool – University College, London.

  1. The UCL’s Wikipedia ‘Translate-a-thon’ is written up here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/case-studies-news/e-learning/teaching-translation-wikipedia
  2. In addition, UCL also ran a Wikipedia session for familiarising Year 1 undergraduates with using sources – making good use of the Wiki Education project dashboard to allow educators to manage & monitor class Wikipedia assignments & communicate with students from a central hub: https://prezi.com/apxnjcabgtdd/when-ucl-students-write-wikipedia.
  3. This one also includes how Wikipedia work complements UCL’s educational strategic aims.

Telling the stories of rural England with Wikipedia – The University of Portsmouth.
Dr Humphrey Southall, Reader in Geography, University of Portsmouth, written with Dr Martin Poulter, describe a Wikipedia-based assignment given to first-year students in Applied Human Geography and also looking at how academics can inform the widest public about their subject, and raise awareness of the reliable sources used in research.

 

In addition – Wiki Education resources

Wiki Education has a variety of materials which may be helpful. 

Whisky (and Projects) Galore!

The residency so far

The residency so far

As the dust settled after the hectic days of Spy Week 2016 and OER16 came to a close and the university exam period came and went, I was left thinking… what’s next?

Projects in development (from the University of Edinburgh Wikimedia residency page)

  • History of Veterinary Medicine edit-a-thon – Event for Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies staff to research & create articles relating to the history of veterinary medicine. 4th July 2016
  • Euro Stem Cell Editathon at Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Edinburgh. Editathon for UoE staff and Eurostemcell partner labs in Europe & at the Wellcome Library.
  • Wikidata (& WikiSource) Showcase (with Pauline Ward & Histropedia’s Navino Evans) at the John McIntyre Conference Centre JMCC – 1st & 2nd August 2016
  • Reproductive Medicine Edit-a-thon (with Dr. Chris Harlow) – 21 September and 28 September. Partnering with West Virginia University.
  • Vet School Wikipedia research session – Edit-a-thon event for Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies students to research & create new Wikipedia articles on Veterinary Medicine. Proposed for October 5th 2016.
  • International Alumni project – Celebrating the international students who studied at Edinburgh University and gone on to have a huge impact abroad (including simultaneous editathons, hopefully, in Singapore & Hong Kong to create a global edit-a-thon). Mooted for early October 2016 for Black History Month.
  • Ada Lovelace Day – Tuesday 11th October 2016 – celebrating the achievements of Women in STEM with a particular focus on female mentors given that Mary Somerville will grace the new £10 note. Truly noteworthy.
  • Day of the Dead editathon – Monday 31st October 2016 – using the obituaries from Scottish & UK newspapers to recognise & celebrate the lives of those sadly passed away.
  • Edinburgh Gothic (agreed a partnership with the National Library of Scotland) – Saturday 12th November. Marking the day before Robert Louis Stevenson Day, the National Library of Scotland will join us to celebrate the best of Edinburgh Gothic, releasing Robert Louis Stevenson images into the public domain to Wikicommons (wherever possible) and any additional material not yet transcribed onto Wikisource. Looking to see if we can combine efforts in gothic art, gothic history, gothic costume design, gothic music, gothic film, gothic literature etc. to fill any gaps on Wikipedia… in the most macabre way.
  • The Kelvin Hall relaunch (in Glasgow) – mooted for late November / early December 2016 (again in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland). The idea is to create an edit-a-thon based on the Moving Image Archive by showing participants short films from the archive on the Video Wall there, creating Wikipedia articles for the films & filmmakers, and showing a longer film afterwards at the Hunterian cinema.
  • Translate-a-thon – Reaching out to bilingual and multi-lingual students to translate articles from English Wikipedia to their own native language Wikipedia (& vice versa) using Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool.
  • Festival of Architecture 2016 – An architecture-themed editathon to celebrate the achievements of architects for the Festival of Architecture 2016.
Whisky Galore

Whisky Galore

And the whisky? It seems my less than unsubtle hints following my trip to Skye in April resulted in my getting a fair few bottles for my birthday.

Projects and whisky galore. Lots to be excited about and lots to get on with!

 

Teaching with Wikipedia (some recent homegrown examples)

A little while ago, I came across the reasons to use Wikipedia, (well worth a read) and have been reflecting on how Wikipedia and its sister projects can be best utilised as a teaching tool.

Simply working with Wikipedia as a teaching assignment is much more straightforward using the new Visual Editor WYSIWYG interface (What You See Is What You Get) which makes editing Wikipedia as easy as using Microsoft Word or WordPress blogging. Students can be taught how to edit in as little as 45mins-60mins and thereafter can work individually or collectively to research & write, with academic rigour, brand new Wikipedia articles.

By way of example, Anouk Lang, English Literature Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, has applied this in getting her students to create a new page on a literary text, Conversations in Bloomsbury, a 1981 memoir that depicts writer Mulk Raj Anand’s life in London during the heyday of the Bloomsbury Group, and his relationships with the group’s members.

The collaborative process engaged her students, and some students in particular who had perhaps been more reticent (or less confident) in participating in more traditional assignments, in researching the topic & in applying the digital literacy skills required to achieve the page’s creation. The net result is not an essay or report that could potentially be filed away & forgotten but instead something that adds to the sum of human knowledge & is discoverable by other readers & editors all over the world so that they, in turn, can add more to it.

Conversations in Bloomsbury

Which all fits in with achieving, quite nicely, with achieving the University’s mission and Wikimedia’s mission.

Areas of convergence between Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh's missions.

Areas of convergence between Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh’s missions.

Similarly, Dr. Chris Harlow at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Reproductive Health, has run Wikipedia research sessions with his Reproductive Medicine Honours students where, within the space of an afternoon’s session, they were able to navigate the open access journals to find enough good quality, reliable published sources to create a new article on a term that previously did not exist on Wikipedia: neuroangiogenesis. In doing so, the students created a page that significantly added to the discourse, and the visibility of the discourse, on a number of other related pages: Angiogenesis, Alzheimer’s disease and Endometriosis.

Neuroangiogenesis

The two links below are booklets which have a number of good places to begin teaching with Wikipedia including how to design your assignment as well as alternative assignment ideas such as translating an article into different languages (now even easier with a Wikipedia tool that allows both articles to be onscreen), illustrating an article (with photos, infographics, videos etc.), copy-editing articles to improve critical thinking skills on how good writing is achieved in your particular discipline and so on.

The second booklet explores a number of case studies of approaches taken implementing Wikimedia assignments within a university. However, it is important to note that these are just starting points and that, as this is a new & developing discipline, that newer models can be designed to better suit your purposes.

  1. How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool
  2. Wikipedia Education Program – Case Studies

If you would like to know more about how our main open knowledge project, Wikipedia, fits in with academia then these recent articles make very compelling reading:

  1. Wikipedia 15 and education
  2. Wikipedia the digital gateway to academic research

Myself and Martin Poulter, former Wikimedia Ambassador at JISC and the current Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, will also be attending the OER16 Conference in Edinburgh on 19-20 April if you want to learn more about the education projects he has been involved in.

Indeed, should you wish to discuss teaching with Wikimedia or collaborating on any projects then I would be only too glad to hear from you.

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