Tag: Open Education

History of Medicine 2017 – Outcomes

On March 15, 2017

For the third year running, the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services division hosted a ‘History of Medicine’ Wikipedia event; to celebrate the lives & contributions of women in medicine, over sixty years of Nursing Studies & seventy-five years of the Polish School of Medicine. Over the course of two afternoons at the Surgeons’ Hall Museums, we unravelled myths, discovered truths, created new pages & re-wrote existing Wikipedia pages of Scotland’s famous, and infamous, medical figures including gruesome body-snatcher William Burke.

Facial reconstruction of William Burke

We were also fortunate to be graced by some excellent guest speakers:

Iain MacIntyre – The Scottish and British Societies of the History of Medicine
Alice Doyle – The Lothian Health Services Archive
Steve Sturdy – The History of Medicine
Janet Philp – Uncovering Burke and Hare
David Wright – An Illustrated History of Scottish Medicine – the inside story
Daisy Cunynghame – The Royal College of Physicians

Articles improved

Burke and Hare murders – Image added of facial reconstruction of William Burke. William Burke’s place of birth added as Orrey from his confession. Other corrections made to the article e.g. date of birth and removing the surname Croswhaite from Joseph as no citation and not found in other material.
John Barclay (anatomist) – An eminent Scottish comparative anatomist, extramural teacher in anatomy, and director of the Highland Society of Scotland. New paragraph added on Barclay’s candidacy for the chair of comparative anatomy. Further information on Barclay’s Life and organisation.
Leith Hospital – 21 paragraphs added.
Thomas Keith (doctor) – Added Early life, photographic career, surgical career. A Victorian surgeon and amateur photographer from Scotland. He developed and improved the wax paper process and his photographs are recognised for their composition and use of shade. He was an early practitioner of the operation of ovariotomy (ovarian cystectomy) where his published results were amongst the best in the world.
Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service – Infobox added and relocated images.
Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia – 3 paragraphs added. The Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia was a medical guide consisting of recipes and methods for making medicine. It was first published by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1699 as the Pharmacopoea Collegii Regii Medicorum Edimburgensium. The Edinburgh Pharmacopeia merged with the London and Dublin Pharmacopoeia’s in 1864 creating the British Pharmacopoeia.
Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh – more information about the future of the hospital added and the various buildings on the current site.
Infobox added to Hanna Segal – British psychoanalyst and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London (UCL) in 1987. James Grotstein considered that “Received wisdom suggests that she is the doyen of “classical” Kleinian thinking and technique.”
Information added about the Polish School of Medicine to the article about Francis Albert Eley Crew – English animal geneticist. He was a pioneer in his field leading to Edinburgh’s place as a world leader in the science of animal genetics. He was the first Director of the Institute of Animal Breeding and the first Professor of Animal Genetics. He is said to have laid the foundations of medical genetics.
Small amendments and a new Publications section added to Douglas Guthrie – Scottish medical doctor, otolaryngologist and historian of medicine.

Articles created

Rebecca Strong – English nurse who pioneered preliminary training for nurses.
Kate Hermann – the first female neurology consultant in Scotland. Hermann, who was Jewish, left with her family from Hamburg to London in 1937, fleeing the Nazis. She then moved, in 1938, to Edinburgh to study at the Royal Infirmary under Professor Norman Dott.
Anne_Ferguson (physician) – Scottish physician, clinical researcher and expert in inflammatory bowel disease. She was educated at Notre Dame School and The University of Glasgow, graduating with a first class honours degree in Physiology, and winning the Brunton Medal. In 1975 she was appointed as a Senior Lecturer at The University of Edinburgh, also becoming a Consultant at the Gastrointestinal Unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. In 1987 she was appointed to a personal professorship in gastroenterology, and was honoured by election as a Fellow to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1990.
Ethel Moir – WW1 nurse with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service.
The Polish School of Medicine – Terrific new illustrated 2200 word article.
Henryk Podlewski – Polish doctor who completed his studies at the Polish School of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh during World War II and became the first Psychiatrist to practice in the Bahamas.
Nancy Loudon – Scottish gynaecologist. She devoted her professional life to pioneering and ensuring provision of family planning and well woman services. As such she was a fore-runner in what is now the specialty of ‘community gynaecology’. This article is now translated on to the Italian Wikipedia.
Krystyna Magdalena Munk – a Polish doctor who completed her studies at the Polish School of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh during World War II.
Elizabeth Wilson (doctor) – Family Planning Doctor and Right-to-Die campaigner. She founded the 408 Clinic, and FATE (Friends at the End) in 2000.

Other outcomes and coverage

Gweduni added Thomas Jehu‘s PhD thesis to Wikisource, the free content library, and proofread all 31 out of 31 OCR-ed pages.
Glasgow Cathedral has been translated to Japanese Wikipedia.
Brown dog affair has been translated to Japanese Wikipedia.
Refrigerator death has been translated to Japanese Wikipedia.
Gomphus clavatus has been translated to Japanese Wikipedia.

And this was all despite Storm Doris trying to throw a spanner in the works!

Wikimedia- on the edge of OER17

By Ewan McAndrew

On March 15, 2017

In Uncategorized

The 2017 Open Educational Resources Conference (OER17) will be held at Resource for London on the 5th and 6th April. The conference theme is “The Politics of Open” and has never been more timely. Registration closes 16th March so don’t delay.

Once again, there is a strong presence of people associated with Wikimedia UK, as well as other Wikimedians. As Wikipedia edges towards 17 years old and we get ever closer to OER17, here’s a look at the presentations coming up from Wikimedia – on the edge of OER17.

Stevie Nicks. By User:SandyMac [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

(Sadly there will be no Stevie Nicks.)

The conference is co-chaired by Wikimedia UK trustee Josie Fraser and Creative Commons Poland co-founder Alek Tarkowski.
Wikimedia UK Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid is one of the keynote speakers.
Lucy Crompton-Reid (CEO Wikimedia UK) – By Simoncromptonreid (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Lucy Crompton-Reid has a career in the cultural, voluntary and public sectors spanning two decades, with a strong emphasis on leading and developing participatory practice and promoting marginalised voices. As Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK since October 2015, she has led the development of a new strategy focused on eradicating inequality and bias on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, with an emphasis on the gender gap and geographic bias. In the past year Lucy has given talks on equality and diversity at the Open Data Institute, Open Source Convention and MozFest, and recently spearheaded an international partnership between Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia communities around the world and the BBC, focused on closing the gender gap on Wikipedia. Lucy will be presenting: “Open as inclusive: Equality and Diversity on Wikimedia” at OER17.
Sara Mörtsell, Education Manager of WikimediaSE, will present on “How openness in mainstream K-12 education can advance with Wikimedia and GLAMs in Sweden” – This proposal addresses how mainstream K-12 education can transition to use and share open educational resources and play a part in the future direction of the open educational movement (Weller 2014). The presentation is based on practical experience of a one year OER project in 2016 with 230 students in K-12 education from both minority and dominant communities in the city of Stockholm.

Sara Mörtsell. Pic by Jonatan Svensson Glad [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
Stefan Lutschinger, an academic and Wikipedia Campus Ambassador at Middlesex University, will present on “Open Pedagogy and Student Wellbeing: Academic Confidence Building with Wikipedia Assignments“. Stefan’s talk talk will introduce the use of Wikipedia assignments in higher education, present a case study, discuss its benefits for students’ academic confidence building and propose a framework for evaluation and critical reflection. The evidence is based on the compulsory course module (level 6) ‘MED3040 Publishing Cultures’ of the BA (Hons) Creative Writing and Journalism degree programme at Middlesex University, Department of Media, developed in cooperation with Wikimedia UK and the Wiki Education Foundation.
Ewan McAndrew – Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh (Own work CC-BY-SA)

Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Edinburgh, is delivering a presentation on “Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected Campus: Reflections from the Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh”. While there have been previous Wikimedia residencies based in UK cultural institutions focussing on opening up collections, five years have now passed since Grathwohl (2011) acclaimed Wikipedia had ‘come of age’ in formal education settings with Wikipedia still representing the oft-ignored “elephant in the room” (Brox, 2012). Hosting a Wikimedian at a Higher Education institution to embed the creation of OER in the curriculum does therefore represent something of a shift in the paradigm. This presentation discusses one such residency and the lessons learnt from the first 15 months.
The artwork “Een vertaling van de ene taal naar de andere” / “A Translation from one language to another” by Lawrence Weiner. Author: brbbl (CC-BY-SA)

Ewan will also be giving a lightning talk on “Building bridges not walls – Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool”. Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool offers an impactful means of sharing open knowledge globally between languages as it brings up an article on one side of the screen in one language and helps translate it, paragraph by paragraph, to create the article in a different language taking all the formatting across to the new article so a native speaker just has to check to make sure the translation is as good as it can be. This presentation will outline the successful models already employed in a Higher Education context.
Martin Poulter By Ziko (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Martin Poulter, Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Oxford, is giving a presentation on “Putting Wikipedia and Open Practice into the mainstream in a University”. OER Conference attendees are often part of a minority group of Open Education advocates in their institutions, and it is a hard challenge to change wider institutional policy and culture. This presentation will share lessons learned from experience in a UK university, using Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects as well as Open Access research publication as levers to encourage an open approach to education. The drive towards open access to the outputs of research, and open access to the collections of cultural institutions, are potentially powerful drivers for the creation of open educational content. This session explores how to push academic culture in that direction.
Citation (desperately) needed. #PoliticsOfOpen

Ewan and Martin are jointly giving a lightning talk on “Citation Needed: Digital Provenance in the era of Post-Truth Politics“.This session covers why the most important frontier of Wikipedia is not its content but its 30 million plus citations (Orlowitz, 2016) and the latest developments behind the WikiCite project after its first year. The WikiCite initiative is to build a repository of all Wikimedia citations and bibliographic metadata in Wikidata to serve all Wikimedia projects. The ultimate goal to make Wikipedia’s citations as “reliable, open, accessible, structured, linked and free as our Knowledge is.”(Orlowitz, 2016)
Gamifying Wikimedia – Learning through play (Pic from Ada Lovelace Day 2016 at the University of Edinburgh – own work CC-BY-SA).

Ewan and Martin will also be running a workshop on “Gamifying Wikimedia – Learning through Play (Workshop)“. This workshop will demonstrate that crowd-sourcing contributions to Wikimedia’s family of Open Education projects does not have to involve a heavy time component and that short fun, enjoyable activities can be undertaken which enhance the opportunities for teaching & learning and the dissemination of open knowledge. Participants will be guided through a series of Wikimedia tools; running through the purpose of each tool, how they can be used to support open education alongside practical demos.
Wikimedia UK volunteer Navino Evans is giving a workshop on “Histropedia – Building an open interactive history of everything with Wikimedia content“.
Navino Evans and Histropedia. Pic by Wittylama (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Histropedia is a web application aiming to create free interactive timelines on every topic in history using open data from Wikimedia projects like Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.All Histropedia timelines are published under an open licence, which means they can be reused and remixed for any purpose, both within Histropedia and elsewhere on the web. Tools like Histropedia provide an incentive for donating text, data and images to Wikimedia projects, as it can instantly be visualised in exciting ways without incurring any cost.
Histropedia timeline of University of Edinburgh female alumni; colour-coded by place of birth and with language labels in Japanese, Russian, Arabic and English.

It also shows how data becomes more valuable when it’s open, as it can be combined and compared with other data in a way that is not possible when kept in isolation. It’s our hope that Histropedia can play a role in getting more educational institutions to engage with Wikimedia content and other open resources, as well as inspire others to build innovative applications on top of the wealth of free knowledge that’s available. In this workshop, we will learn how to use Histropedia by completing a sequence of practical exercises to find, combine and improve content.
Alice White, Wikimedian in Residence at the Wellcome Library, will also in attendance running a Wikimedia session in the Lewis Suite.
Alice White- By Zeromonk (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Something for everyone there. Look forward to seeing you there!

Seeing the links at the ‘Celtic Knot’ – Wikipedia Language Conference

By Ewan McAndrew

On March 10, 2017

In Uncategorized

Tying the Celtic Knot. Pic by David J. Fred [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

The first ‘Celtic Knot’ – Wikipedia Language Conference will take place Thursday 6 July 2017 at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with Wikimedia UK. This Wikimedia event will focus on Celtic Languages and Indigenous Languages, showcasing innovative approaches to open education, open knowledge and open data that support and grow language communities.

CC-BY-SA (Own work)

To assist with seeing the connections and areas of commonality between your work and the Celtic Knot conference please read the below guide to the Wikimedia projects:

The Celtic Knot conference is jointly supported by the University of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK.

Wikimedia UK logo

Wikimedia UK is the registered charity that supports and promotes Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, and the volunteers who write, edit and curate the content of the projects.

Our mission is to help people and organisations create and preserve open knowledge and to provide easy access for all. We support the widest possible public access to, use of and contribution to open content of an encyclopaedic or educational nature.

Culture: We work closely with cultural institutions, including galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) to help them realise the potential of openly-licensed content for public benefit.
Education: Wikipedia is more than a reference work. All over the world people and institutions are exploring the ways that Wikipedia can be used as a formal education tool. It belongs in education.
Volunteers: The Wikimedia projects are written, edited and curated by volunteers who are just like you. There are many ways to get involved – there are activities to suit the interests of everybody. You can also become a member of the charity.

Wikimedia’s family of Open Knowledge projects

Wikimedia’s family of Open Knowledge projects include:

Wikipedia: the free online encyclopaedia exists in each Celtic and Indigenous language and Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool allows articles to be translated easily between different language Wikipedias.
Wikimedia Commons: a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language.
Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects and many other sites and services beyond. Wikidata can connect other databases and collections of information, allowing computers and software to see connections between hundreds of data sources. GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) realise that their collections become more useful and reusable when they are deeply interlinked with other collections around the world. Creating open structured data for their collections increases their impact on the public.
Wikisource – The Free Library – is a multilingual project to create a growing free content library of OCR-ed source texts, as well as translations of source texts in any language including constitutional documents, court rulings, plays, poems, songs, novels, short stories, letters, travel writing, speeches, obituaries, news articles and more.
Wiktionary, a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary.
Wikibooks is a multilingual project for collaboratively writing open-content textbooks that anyone can edit including textbooks, annotated texts, instructional guides, and manuals. These materials can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment or for self-learning.
Wikivoyage—a multilingual, web-based project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide.

In addition, the Wiki Education Foundation connects secondary & higher education to the publishing power of Wikipedia. Bridging Wikipedia and academia creates opportunities for any learner to contribute to, and access, open knowledge. We cultivate deeper learning for students as they expand Wikipedia articles for course assignments. We work with libraries to expand the public’s access to their resources. We support academic associations as they expand and improve Wikipedia’s coverage of their field.

If you can see a clear commonality between your work and the projects above then we welcome diverse attendees and presenters working in Celtic and Indigenous languages ranging from Wikimedians, educators, researchers, information professionals, media professionals, linguists, translators, learning technologists and more coming together to share good practice and find fruitful new collaborations to support language communities as a result of the event.

Conference Themes

Building language confidence: participation, public engagement & social equality.
Putting our language on the map: preserving & opening up our cultural heritage.
Languages on the road to open: ongoing or new projects and initiatives in open knowledge, open education and open data.
The politics of language: Local, national, and international policy and practice; advocacy for funding, institutional and community support and investment
Hacking; making; sharing

The offical call for session proposals has now closed but email ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk if you would like to attend or have a session you would like to showcase.

NB: Abstracts have now been reviewed as of April 2017 and notifications sent out to speakers.

Robert Louis Stevenson (public domain pic from Wiki Commons)

A Christmas Sermon – Robert Louis Stevenson on Wikisource

By Ewan McAndrew

On January 4, 2017

In Uncategorized

Robert Louis Stevenson (public domain pic from Wiki Commons)

In ‘A Christmas Sermon’, a short public domain text available on Wikisource, Robert Louis Stevenson meditates on the holiday season, death, morality and man’s main task in life: “to be honest, to be kind… to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence.”

‘A Christmas Sermon’ appeared in a collection of essays entitled ‘Across the plains: with other Memories and Essays’ (1892) and was written, along with The Master of Ballantrae, shortly after Stevenson’s father had passed away and while Stevenson himself was recovering from a lung ailment at Lake Saranac, New York, in the winter of 1887.

More openly-licensed Christmas texts can be found at Wikisource’s Portal:Christmas including Is There a Santa Claus? (1897).

Wikisource, the hyper library hosts over 340,000 out-of-copyright longer texts (plays, poems, short stories, novels, letters, speeches, constitutional documents, songs & more) as demonstrated by the range of texts on Robert Louis Stevenson’s page here.

Yule cat (from Public Domain Super Heroes)

Yule Lads and Yule cat – on the greatest Open Education Resource: Wikipedia.

By Ewan McAndrew

On January 4, 2017

In Uncategorized

Yule Lads – on the greatest Open Education Resource: Wikipedia.

The Yule Lads – Picture taken by Inga Vitola CC-BY via Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/360around/8438686745/in/photolist-dRGtz4-dBRVEa-dBGFuw-5MeWDT-dBGFTu)

Yule lads are 13 trolls from Icelandic folklore who put rewards (or punishments) in shoes laid out on windowsills by children on the 13 nights in the run up to Christmas. Some Yule lads are mere pranksters while some are… homicidal monsters who eat children.

You can find out more about the Yule lads (and when they’re due to arrive in town) on the greatest open education tool; Wikipedia.

But just in case, below is a list of their names & descriptions so you can watch out for them (and their monstrous Yule Cat)!

Yule cat (from
Public Domain Super Heroes)

Icelandic Name	English translation	Description
Stekkjarstaur	Sheep-Cote Clod	Harasses sheep, but is impaired by his stiff peg-legs.
Giljagaur	Gully Gawk	Hides in gullies, waiting for an opportunity to sneak into the cowshed and steal milk.
Stúfur	Stubby	Abnormally short. Steals pans to eat the crust left on them.
Þvörusleikir	Spoon-Licker	Steals spoons to lick. Is extremely thin due to malnutrition.
Pottaskefill	Pot-Scraper	Steals leftovers from pots.
Askasleikir	Bowl-Licker	Hides under beds waiting for someone to put down their bowl which he then steals.
Hurðaskellir	Door-Slammer	Likes to slam doors, especially during the night.
Skyrgámur	Skyr-Gobbler	A Yule Lad with an affinity for skyr.
Bjúgnakrækir	Sausage-Swiper	Would hide in the rafters and snatch sausages that were being smoked.
Gluggagægir	Window-Peeper	A voyeur who would look through windows in search of things to steal.
Gáttaþefur	Doorway-Sniffer	Has an abnormally large nose and an acute sense of smell which he uses to locate laufabrauð.
Ketkrókur	Meat-Hook	Uses a hook to steal meat.
Kertasníkir	Candle-Stealer	Follows children in order to steal their candles.

Screengrab of Histropedia Wikidata Query Viewer (CC-BY-SA).

Histropedia – knowledge from Wikipedia visualised as dynamic timelines

By Ewan McAndrew

On January 4, 2017

In Uncategorized

Histropedia Timelines – In the (Saint) Nick of Time.

Can you spot Saint Nick in the below timeline of saints?

Screengrab of Histropedia Wikidata Query Viewer (CC-BY-SA).

For today’s post, the Open Education resource we present to you is Histropedia – the timeline of everything.

Histropedia allows users to create visually dynamic timelines using structured data from Wikidata, articles from Wikipedia and images from Wikimedia Commons. It has in excess of 340,000 timelines listing 1.5 million articles from Wikipedia: including timelines on the Battles of World War One, the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the Novels by Charles Dickens, Empires, Famous Artists, the filmography of David Bowie and many more.

This 1 minute 22 second video demonstrates how quickly & easily timelines can be put together using Wikipedia articles & categories to dramatically visualise events.

By way of example, I was able to create this Santa Claus in the movies timeline in a matter of minutes going from the 1900 movie, A Christmas Dream, by Georges Méliès right up to modern day with films like Trading Places (1983), Miracle on 34^th Street (1994) and Arthur Christmas (2012). The published timeline is now available for others to view and add to as a free open education resource where each timeline event can be clicked on to take you through to the Wikipedia article to find out more.

Screengrab of Histropedia timeline for Santa Claus in the movies. (CC-BY)

Further, now that the Histropedia now has a Wikidata Query Viewer option this means that the structured data can now be queried even further. For example, I was curious to find out more about Saint Nick so I was able to ask Wikidata to show me all the saints it had information about and show them on a timeline according to their year of birth and colour coded by their place of birth. Click here to view the result.

Screengrab from Histropedia Wikidata Query Viewer Tutorial – Timeline of University of Edinburgh female alumni colour-coded by place of birth and labelled in Japanese, Russian, Arabic and English (CC-BY)

Histropedia’s developers, Navino Evans and Sean McBirnie, joined us at Repository Fringe at the University of Edinburgh in August this year where we recorded a short video tutorial in order to demonstrate how to create a Histropedia timeline using their Wikidata Query Viewer – this time on female alumni of the University of Edinburgh; colour-coded by their place of birth and labelled in Japanese, Russian, Arabic & English (depending on whether the query could find an article in these 4 different language Wikipedias).

This OER video tutorial has now been viewed a thousand times and is available to view on the university’s Media Hopper channel on a CC-BY license.

To find out more about Histropedia, you can read this article from the Wikimedia UK blog but why not have a go yourself!