2024:Program/Student engagement with openness

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Session title: Student engagement with openness

Session type: Lecture

Track: Education

Language: en

At the University of Edinburgh, our Wikimedian in Residence has provided, for over 8 years, a free central service to all staff and students across the whole University, supporting teaching, learning and research and our key institutional commitments to develop digital literacy, data literacy, information literacy and, importantly, equality, diversity and inclusion. Colleagues from a number of schools and colleges have integrated Wikipedia and Wikidata editing assignments into their courses. Editing Wikipedia provides valuable opportunities for students to develop their digital research and communication skills, and enables them to contribute to the creation and dissemination of open knowledge.

Description

“Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.” Frances Wright, the Scottish feminist and social reformer, who was born in Dundee in 1795, but who rose to prominence in the United States as an abolitionist, a free thinker, and an advocate of women’s equality in education Equality can also be said to be the soul of openness. Two hundred plus years down the line, open knowledge and open education can only be the future if we design and structure open spaces and communities so that anyone can participate. Writing articles that will be publicly accessible and live on after the end of their assignment has proved to be highly motivating for students in seeing how they can have real agency in correcting imbalances online, and provides an incentive for them to think more deeply about their research. It encourages them to ensure they are synthesising all the reliable information available, and to think about how they can communicate their scholarship to a general audience as a lasting output of their studies that can help better the world at large.

At the University of Edinburgh, we work with students as partners in a spirit of open collaboration and co-creation; to empower them to work with Wikipedia and Wikidata as forms of learning technologies to actively engage with support the development of their graduate competencies, both inside and outside the curriculum.

This presentation will share details of our 20 published case studies of Wikipedia in the Curriculum as well as our reflections on 8 years’ embedding Wikipedia in the heart of an ancient university including: advising & supporting academic colleagues, delivering 80+ WikIproject ‘Women in Red” monthly workshops, developing and refining Wikipedia assignments year-on-year, collaborating on funded and unfunded student projects, mentoring a variety of student interns, and creating a new voluntary 55-80 hour ‘Edinburgh Award’ to support students’ graduate employability outside of their studies.

Talking about a Wikipedia assignment that focused on improving articles on Islamic art, science and the occult, Dr Glaire Anderson, from Edinburgh College of Art commented:

“Our experiment in applying our knowledge outside the classroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive, something that mattered. As one student commented, “Really love the Wikipedia project. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world, if in a small way.”

Other examples to be discussed include Global Health Challenges postgraduates collaborating to improve stub Wikipedia articles on natural or manmade disasters around the world. History students re-examining the legacy of Scotland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and presenting a more positive view of black British history.

Session recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/wLgxZTcjhjY?si=POQvnW26tqevogTD&t=7920

How does your session relate to the event theme, Collaboration of the Open?

This is a presentation that showcases a year-on-year collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK since 2016 and with 15-20 course programmes at the University of Edinburgh and the creation of a UK booklet of (now 20) Case Studies of Wikimedia in UK education from institutions from across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. It also shows how after years over working with students in the curriculum and a succession of internships that we receive enquiries about how other institutions might follow our example or host/tailor assignments or projects to their own needs. It also shows how we have had to build from and learn from prior learning, document our work, and make easy-to-follow open-licensed resources (pdfs, video tutorials, web pages) available to support teaching, learning and research both online, hybrid and in-person. All of this has been about collaboration in the open in partnership with students as we have had to ask and answer questions from so many in the Wikimedia community, of different schools, disciplines, departments, of student societies, of students, educators, senior managers, the careers service and more.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Resources

Speakers

Ewan McAndrew

Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh (Jan 2016 to date)

Mapping the Accused Witches of Scotland with Wikidata (witches.is.ed.ac.uk)

Wikimedia at the University of Edinburgh website (tinyurl.com/wiki-uoe)

Ruby Imrie

An intern at the University of Edinburgh working on the Map of Accused Witches in Scotland Project. Recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in Computer Science.