 with Adam Levine and Mia Zamora and Nicholas and followed by working local impacting global teaching in the open with Lucas Wright and Brian Lump and stories of student empowerment with in McAndrew so the floor is all theirs I'll be just playing with the red card okay oh no the red card all right so we have to start here's a story there you go of Alan who lives on the internet and strawberry and of course he's a brilliant educational technologist that we all know I don't pay her for that so Mia she's an English prof at Cain University not pronounced keen I'm still getting that difference and she teaches classes in electronic literature and in January 2017 we hatched a crazy idea we were at the DML digital media and learning conference which is at UC Irvine and we decided to make some digital alchemy through a networked digital storytelling class but that's really another story but there's a link for that in between that time in August 2017 I made a move from New Jersey to Norway my sabbatical year where I took the position of Fulbright professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen but there's a situation there were five MA students in writing studies that Mia was advising who needed a thesis advisor and somehow she cooked up this idea that I could do this from Arizona and he certainly did so no surprise we decided to roll out a seminar that fall when I first arrived in Norway that was a co-locational seminar the seminar was called Resnet SEM that's the hashtag which stood for research networked seminar and one of the interesting things was that my students were they were doing two semesters of the MA thesis and Mia's were in a one semester a course on a research course and that's the course that Nicholas was in I'll add that there were two different topics the students in New Jersey were working on their writing studies MA thesis while the students in Norway were in a digital aesthetics seminar I forget is this yours or mine you can take it go I might have gotten a false by one anyhow we had separate course sites there each wordpress sites in both classes the MA students were writing up their research in their own blogs they were syndicated to these two different sites and they so we had two different spaces on the internet for their work but then we also tied things quite beautifully together with other writing tools and other platforms that we were using together so of course we are doing Twitter and of course we have to make a Twitter tags hash cloud thank you Martin Hoxie we did we did try to have a slack and that'll be a thing we come back to we thought we could create a little bit more overlap in slack and something didn't exactly connect there but we did initially have some things I wouldn't my students learn about hypothesis for social annotation and I also want to introduce them to using RSS feeds to not only read each other's blogs but I had my students sort of start developing their own sets of information feeds that would help their research so this is a glimpse of our students on both sides of the Atlantic on the left you see the New Jersey students on the right you see the Norwegian students and one of the things we did do through the slack is we created these little hello videos to each other we're not going to play them here but they're worth coming back to their marvelous so one of the things we wanted to share out in this quick minute or 15 minutes that we have is the idea of how to seed research in a networked learning experience so we're arguing that certain infrastructureing moves are need so are needed in order to facilitate that possibility the first move that we wanted to share with you is the use of virtually connecting as a kind of forum for learning for each of our student for each of our student groups so in this particular example we we dialed in to the digital media and learning conference that occurred this fall 2017 and in that conference we spoke with Henry Jenkins in my digital aesthetic seminar we were reading quite a bit of Henry because one of the important themes of the course was participatory culture so it was a really wonderful example of sort of leveling the field and having students directly connect with well-known contributors to that field one of the powerful powerful aspects of what happened there is that one of our students Catherine who's interested in pursuing a MA thesis on the deviant art community in particular she was able to speak directly with Henry about the formulations of her thesis and fine-tune her angle and her perspective on it so that's an example again of a specific kind of infrastructureing move that is powerful for student learners Catherine was terribly nervous and so but she she did beautifully and she was I mean young students they're really worried about not appearing foolish and they want to have their research ideas validated and to be able to ask directly of the godfather of participatory culture was a really great move another idea I had was again it's almost like doing virtual connecting again is how can we bring some expertise into my writing studies master students first of all I don't know much about literature so I have to rely on other people to bring in as experts so I asked some people to come in for a hangout with my students and each of my students had 10 minutes to pitch their thesis idea to some people and just get kind of some open feedback and so all of them really said that that was a pivotal moment for them to realize of these external experts that were available and willing also to connect with them after the session and also a thesis tank no one wins or loses well everybody wins I think that's the premise before we play this next video I'll just say that open doesn't open willy-nilly doesn't work unless you sort of think about anchors for students to become empowered to ask the right questions and to direct those questions towards connectedness in particular ways if it's just why don't you throw out a tweet about this question even in a hashtag environment that might have some attention it doesn't necessarily yield back the kind of results that are empowering for students so those two examples of infrastructureing moves are more specific ways students become empowered in an open in an open environment let's hear from the students and also I want to add I mean one of the like the lowest tech thing that was maybe the most effective was email it was connecting my students with some people who had very specific expertise or references or other people they could connect to in the field so just introducing your students by another colleague by email worked really well I had this grand plan I'd be able to bring my students to the conference but that didn't come short but we have two of them who kind of re sent some videos about their response the experience hi my name is Marissa and I'm a student of Professor Alan Levine and Dr. Mia Zamora at the King University English and Writing Studies MA program here in New Jersey hello my name is Laura Lopez I am a King University student enrolled in the writing studies program my thesis is a study of personhood in young adult science fiction dystopian literature my thesis is basically a creative writing project centered around a series of fictional conversations with my father who passed away on 9-11 what I've liked about this semester is that it's been a really interesting way of exploring new technological ways of gathering data for individual research projects another aspect of the program that I really loved was in addition to being a student I'm a mother and a full-time teacher so each of our sessions were was run through a Google Hangout so being able to connect remotely was really convenient and again I felt connected to both my classmates and my professor my thesis is about technology and implementing it into daily life so it was interesting to explore that in my own life for example using different tools and there were three tools that stood out to me that we used that were new to me it would dotero hypothesis and speedily something else that I liked about the network nature of this seminar is that we were able to meet people from all around the world that we otherwise wouldn't likely encounter organically and that was a really cool experience because you got to meet people who might know about your topic and they could really help you and that really that helped that happened a couple times throughout the course of the semester and it was a really excellent opportunity one of my favorite aspects of the course was the thesis tank that we did early on in the fall seminar and it was basically a Google Hangout where a panel of scholars in related fields were willing and able to give us advice and feedback on our thesis so we kind of gave them an elevator pitch and they were they were ready with resources and just good insight and that experience really helped to shape the the direction of my project very early on and not only that but after the thesis tank session was over many of these experts you know connected with me via email or twitter or by posting comments on my blog so that experience was definitely one that was well worth it and really made me feel connected and supported by a community larger than just cane university I've had a great experience in this network class and I recommend it to everyone so Nicholas is my student in Norway and he was going to share a bit of his own experience in the in the seminar and in the networked context so I took part in this seminar last semester found it really interesting my initial thoughts when we started this semester was my my interest my key interest at that time was participatory culture and I really enjoyed the thought of this silent majority basically the larger user group of the web that doesn't speak up or do anything but as the semester progressed I got more and more into the notion of being networked and using your networks for more than just a social theme and towards the end of the semester I kind of shifted my focus from participatory culture and the silent majority and onto networked education and how you could use participatory culture in a educational way and in an educational environment so that was basically how I progressed during the semester started at one point with participatory culture and ending with the same theme just way more specific and something I actually find more interesting yeah so we thought we would end on that note because we thought it was an organic and provocative sense of what can happen when you seed research in a networked environment and things grow from an initial perspective into one that might very well grow out of the practice itself so thank you and we've finished early so that means we can have a conversation a bit if you're curious about anything no questions for you but I do have a question for you Mia brought up a point which I think is fascinating is the idea of building infrastructure around that sense of openness and can you talk more about that because that's really compelling to me thank thank you so much for opening that up because I think that's really important so I've been an advocate as you know for a long time of connected learning and I think that those theoretical models for learning might be helpful in this particular case connected learning really gets to your question in a way so as I said before I think the open context is powerful and definitely might lead to a sense of empowerment in students but it could also leave them at risk or or kind of just lost at sea so how do we infrastructure in a way that's powerful connected learning really helps us home home in on on the specific kind of sense of pillars of what makes for transformative connection so I'm just going to review some of those pillars in the theory and then maybe even think a little bit out loud about what moves we made or how they connect to those moves so one of the things that's really important is the notion of self-driven interest that is students come into classrooms with things they have passion about and those things should have play in the classroom they should have a role to play within the conversations that occur in the classroom so that's the first thing another idea is the notion of shared purpose so a community of learners come together for a course experience and they're at first is just this sort of notion of getting to know each other but over time one can apprehend a sense of shared values or something that that everybody suddenly feels a kind of shared commitment for and that should play a role in what happens in the classroom another pillar of connected learning is the idea of pure supported learning so it's not only the instructor in a hierarchical fashion that has the knowledge to sort of pass down but rather that everyone in the room has something to bear on what we discover together so the co-learner model of learning another aspect of the learning theory is simply academic oriented learning and that's where the instructor can through experience show all kinds of sort of ways to sort through thinking and analysis and some of those moves that we see infrastructurally are the tools you know some of the tools and then of course that kind of training that comes from the field is also evident I think in the conversations the the kinds of things that happen in terms of building a lit review those are academically oriented procedures and experiences that students can have another important pillar I'm trying to think I'm there's I think there's one that I'm missing right now that I'll think of later and get very upset that I've forgotten but that does I think just those things alone gives you a sense of the kinds of things that move away just from okay here's the open environment into how can we listen to each other and build relationships because ultimately the openness is important for breaking down barriers for teaching beyond the the four walls that we exist in spatially but openness doesn't go all the way and so those ideas like the thesis tank or a virtually connected session with the leader in the field we Alan and I often call those studio visits and other learning experiments we do together because we want to give it a feel of stopping by and catching someone at work naturally those kinds of things I think are infrastructureing moves that facilitate connected learning and connection well oh I just want to say also like infrastructure sounds like big permanent rigid structures I mean we're talking about stuff that we swap out on the fly and and you can do very quickly to change I mean one thing is like I realize my students they didn't know any they've never talked to a reference librarian and I'm like you're missing out on the most incredible thing in the library they know about the databases and the chairs and the wi-fi but it's like if you don't know how to like formulate a question to bring to a reference librarian you're really missing out and so that's a non-technological tool yeah just to back up what Alan said is it's so important to think of that word infrastructureing more as in the way we're using it or the intonation that we're bringing to it is a move it's a strategy not necessarily a building of a solid thing that will always stay the same see how this goes uh okay so let's just jump into this because we don't have enough time we're gonna run out of time no take your time um no no we're not fine you think we're fine um we we actually intentionally left this particular slide blank because this would be the part where we might talk of it you know I think one of the nice luxuries of being in a group like this is probably most of the people in this room can make a more compelling argument for why in the age of surveillance capitalism uh that we need to be mindful about you know what learning in the open means and what we're exposing our learners to but that is essentially the theme and actually to I wish I could recall the phrase that Javier finished with in the previous session um that notion that when you are in these kinds of spaces how do you meaningfully allow the participants to actually kind of co-create the spaces they're in and how do you be mindful of what these kinds of effects might be um so I'm gonna leave it at that just because we're gonna run out of time and with that I'm gonna hand it over to Lucas. Great so uh I'm Lucas Wright and this is Brian Lamb uh just I'll take a little bit of time for those intros I work at BC campus and uh at UBC uh in Vancouver so I have two hats on here and Brian works at TRU and you all probably know him so what I'm gonna do is go scatter shot through a few slides and ideas about examples where we can engage students with shaping the web and openly participating but at the same time think about Amy Collier's idea of digital sanctuary and how we can deal with giving them resilience and helping protect the vulnerable on the web. I'll stop with the owl now. So can open textbooks help save the web? This year I've worked around open textbooks quite a bit and uh what's interesting and what we've found this year looking at the analytics is that actually they're not just being used as textbooks they're being stumbled on all the time in Google searches so now when someone searches for ear irrigation instead of just looking on WebMD they're actually finding an open textbook around ear irrigation which is interesting as someone who spent a lot of time on WebMD when I shouldn't. Another thing about open textbooks is right now you're probably hearing a lot about inclusive access so publishers are deciding that they can have open they can use OER, Cengage, Pearson, etc but they they see a model in it and part of their business model that I didn't realize is analytics on those textbooks so looking at how students access that textbook and coming up with reading analytics this is just from an article around inclusive access gather data that could influence changes made to future editions of course materials that data can also go to a lot of other places as we found out recently so do open textbooks actually provide a digital sanctuary for students reading data something I never thought we would need is to think about preventing someone from knowing all of our reading habits oh I don't know this new fangled website that well here we go scroll down hit the arrow there we are second of all a really quick example is can we help educate students and mainly connect with students and help raise awareness around what it means to be a digital citizen and digital identity so this example is from the University of British Columbia the digital tattoo project the digital tattoo project is a collaboration between U of T UBC particularly libraries as well as students and students create articles they do research on what their digital tattoo is but this year it's taken an interesting slam they're looking at things like what happens to my data when I put it in the LMS where does my data go they've been interviewing Michael Geist so by bringing these students together and connecting them we're changing the way and helping them think about different ways of interacting on the web this is the most awkward slide switcher ever for me um sorry that's part of my shtick can we create open spaces at our institutions where students can create and share and the example here is the UBC wiki so at UBC they've downloaded a version of media wiki and rather than having students participate in the great wide open they have them create articles and contribute to articles this is an article about pop tarts that a food science course added I added this one because for this instructor the UBC wiki was training wheels for using the main wiki or media wiki in this case the student talked about food science the next year the instructor had their same students contribute to wikipedia it worked really well it was really exciting but someone named the pink beast I don't know if anyone here is the editor of the pink beast deleted two or three of the articles right away and these were student assignments so it's awesome but sometimes the training wheels are quite useful for students to help experimenting in the open before going to the full open space and finally safety and crowds again at UBC this year there's been a bit of a shift away from just using wikipedia for course assignments to having students participate in editathons so having them work together as a group in a certain time and space and edit articles about science literacy where they added female scientists to wikipedia this was done across five institutions in bc edit articles about women artists female artists this is a north american movement around women in art called art in feminism campaign so by being in this single space and time they can support each other help each other both understand the system but also deal with trolling and deal with some of the challenges that come when we're participating in the open all right i'm going to turn it over to you brian so lucas actually prepared materials and worked through his points in an orderly and clear manner so that was good while it lasted um part of what this theme when i was thinking about how we're going to do this actually came out of last year's oer 17 which was a really mean actually every oer event i've been to here has been very meaningful to me but it came out of last year with this really pervasive sense that this was kind of a watershed moment in terms of the open web and our learning on the web and then right after oer 17 um daniel convened a few of us in coventry for this really intense day long uh conversation and audrey waters was there and the folks who did the uh safety and online learning workshop here last year uh the towards openness folks were there and we gathered and we talked and we just depressed the hell out of ourselves like we were just like you know we you know the the environment we find ourselves in is just completely intolerable what can we do about this and we sat there and i daniel if i'm misrepresenting but my recollection was that we just kind of sat there in silence and kind of shook our heads and i remember actually audrey turned to me and she said well brian i've been to thompson rivers university i've seen what's unique about your institution and the community you serve what you need to do is think about how you can serve your community and let the wider world take care of itself and that was a really kind of intense moment for me now i'm not we're going to presume we did that but i did want to kind of point to a few of the the things we're doing um here locally so um i'm not going to talk about consent forms but it's actually really interesting so oh gosh um so yes um i wasn't going to talk about splits but a couple people actually asked me to to talk a little bit about them and it's actually fortuitous that we're here because actually so splots are a co-creation between alan levina myself so all alan did was uh come up with the concept of how the tools would work all of the coding and all of the development and building and maintaining the sites i came up with an acronym although i haven't quite figured out what they stand for so it's been really a really great kind of 50 50 partnership uh to this point and just to kind of boil down what a splot is god i wish i could just i wanted to show an example of the the writer tool there we go so essentially what a splot tool is i mean even though we haven't quite figured out what the acronym is is the idea of creating the simplest possible learning online tool you can and the thing that's notable about a splot is once it's kind of set up you shouldn't need to provision accounts or collect any data whatsoever from the participants so in other words if you're creating a course blog the students don't need to give an email address they don't need to put an account anywhere they don't need to give their name you'll notice we default anonymity in terms of identity the participants decide how they'll determine themselves the other thing is is they don't actually have to learn wordpress now learning wordpress is a good thing but maybe i just want to get these students writing on the open web so that's kind of the thread that runs across all the different splot tools is minimal private or minimal data collection and trying to just simplify the process and and moving that along so i'll just you know that's essentially what splotting is i won't get into too many of the examples but it's been used a lot at tru a huge advantage of the splots and by the way the splot writer theme is just a theme you can install into a wordpress site so this doesn't require any major overhead to install this on your own thing and Alan's done a really nice job documenting it it's fantastic for supporting course blogs at an institution because account creation is probably and maintenance is one of the biggest issues and essentially too we don't even have to do introductory workshops on how to do it we pretty much create the site spin it out and we just sit back and enjoy the writing a couple a link to one that's from apps for access justice course there's a course on law at thompson rose university where the students actually use the naota logic plot platform to build actual legal expert system apps that essentially will guide you through a process it's actually was um inspired by there's a tool in london for people to fight their parking tickets that that apparently a lot of times there were fallacious parking tickets being given but it's such a process to do the appeal that they were getting away with it so this tool apparently walks you through the process submits your appeal and often will get you off the hook so they had they've created ones for things like dealing with spousal abuse issues they actually have one as well to document annual cruelty so this is a project of real apps forest of real students where they literally are helping puppies which is pretty fantastic i was a little hesitant to point to this but i think when i talk about our community we have a very very high proportion of indigenous students at our campus and i just think i can't go into it but the canadian history as we really have a shameful history there and we have a gaping wound that is not even beginning to heal um and there's some interesting issues around what it means to be on the open web around indigenous issues i'll just point to this paper and the macro to cms which apparently reclaim hosting is the preferred provider i want to chat with you guys about that um but i just wanted to point to this knowledge makers project just because there is still something to be said for students being able to tell their own stories on the web so um when you see things like saying my grandmother attended a residential school in this territory today i stand on that same land a first generation published indigenous researcher so there is still power in that basic concept of being able to tell their stories i've only got a minute or two to go so i'm just going to jump to i'm not going to be able to do it an actual live demo which is probably a good thing um the concept of cloning is very powerful in terms of supporting websites um so one of our students for this project the knowledge makers a student actually created a starter portfolio embedded it with critical questions to aid the reflection process and the students essentially could build on top of it and create their own spaces uh and then finally i just want to give a little shout out and it's so fantastic that our collaborator brian mathers is in the room um and this is the open ed tech co-op we were calling it the co-op actually but we weren't really a co-op because we were too lazy to actually incorporate um as a co-op and it was actually brian who had the brilliant idea to kind of just take that notion of ed tech co-op and to collaborative and make it open etc which i think just kind of has a poetic ring to it open etc it's something open it has something to do with technology um and grant potter and tennis morgan have been my collaborates on that it's just been such a blast to work with them i know i only have one more minute to go but if anyone wants i can demonstrate this process later because this is something very slick that grant potter is done essentially we can create pre-themed preconfigured sites ready to run and then when people sign up from an open etc participating group enter their email address determine which of their sites they want created and hit the create site button and they will get so you can install the splot writer the splot collector a set of preconfigured e-portfolios just by going to the site so i don't even have to create sites now for for students creating portfolios um this is a process that works really well and again grant potter deserves the credit for that so again uh another shout out to brian it was such a joy to work with him on this and i he's also kind of to blame for the chicken becoming i i think i think the reason it resonated with us is kind of i think as ed texts we often kind of feel like battery farm chickens trapped in our little cages and just kind of you know with no room to move at all and you know the the badass free-range chicken ready to run uh really resonated with us so thanks again to brian for that and i'm scoping thanks next presenter gets um install a year you we'll take with this work from the public sir actually you know that i'm on prior of your work so um it's really nice to be hearing how we like actually able to thank so many people doing so many great things and actually thanks for your collection of stickers you can have a seat by the means on here questions i don't actually see anyone having questions oh no yes okay let's start with the keynotes uh the star no pressure i'm going to do that classic thing where i'm going to say not so much a question but a comment but it will be a very short one now just i think the the issue of anonymity is really really interesting i think the way that you've worked so hard to facilitate that and i just think there's an interesting interface there with the way that so much openness depends on licenses that require attribution so i i mean i i don't really know what i want to say about that but i i just think there's a lot more that we need to explore there about anonymity and attribution and when we need one and when we need the other so i don't know if it's it's something that you've had i think about yeah that is an excellent question and i'll just kind of dodge it just to once again they'll give a shout out to that paper on questions related to indigeneity and openness it it's a really interesting critique of some of the embedded assumptions around openness and that kind of naive information wants to be free ethos that i mean i think it inspired me at the time and it was partly what got me involved with communities like this one but at the same time i think as we go deeper into this and really start to look at the human dimensions of the work we're involved with i think it's really great to have voices like that raising those kinds of questions not just for the those specific communities but for everybody so when using splat how do you track your students if all of them can post something anonymously so when people are going to do graded assignments and um and you're using a spot i usually encourage the students first of all they're alan actually coded in a little area where you can put a message in behind the scenes that will not be on the website itself and the other thing you can just do is create a pseudonym and as long as your your instructor knows what your pseudonym is that that tends to work i mean we've never done a spot like that at a scale of hundreds and hundreds of students that typically our typical groups have been around 20 to 50 students and at that level it's very manageable i'll let you answer a question can you talk a little bit about the infrastructure you're running the splats off of for the that grand potter i'd love to hear more about that okay so um the specific tool is a plug-in called an s cloner and the free version actually runs beautifully with wordpress multi-site i think anyone that's running wordpress multi-site for an institution i highly recommend the plug-in even the free version just lets you take any site you've built and clone it and um and and that's just such an incredible lifesaver when you're trying to you know what just you know let's say you have a site that's kind of set up for courses and you have a discussion area and a drop box and once you've done that kind of work you can really build on it uh easily the ns cloner paid version allows you to to do prefigured templates that can be public facing so that's essentially the technology that that grant built on and so obviously too the cloud around stuff you guys were talking about this morning as a cloning kind of principle and moving stuff around across domains is something i think we're going to be looking at that was really interesting we have to move on to the presentation thank you Brian thank you so much for coming afterwards and then the boat trip so i think it's going to be like lots lots discussions in the boat trip by now uh it is here and uh well there you go thank you gone weird how long have i got 15 okay um so this is hopefully a nice easy one uh because what i've done is i've recorded uh interviews uh with about eight different students at the University of Edinburgh who have been involved in the wikimedia residency there hi my name is you and i work as the wikimedia in residence there i've been there for two years now so i'm not going to talk too long and let because i really want the students to take the floor because it shouldn't just be me beating the drum with there's a growing network of open knowledge nodes now at the university and across scotland and i'm really privileged to work with launa and charlie um the full interviews are on that tiny url link they're really good if you want to know about year two you can find it at tinyurl.com forward slash wiki residency two and a little infographic for tiny url.com wiki residency for the first year and so the two-year reports are all written up and this is what we were trying to do raise awareness of wikipedia and its sister projects design and deliver digital skills engagement events and just to work with colleagues all across the institution about how we can better share open knowledge and benefit from the wikimedia projects and contribute to the wikimedia projects so open knowledge for the win so uh because time has come the war has said to talk of many things or for the students to talk of many things. Cambridge Analytica left a bit of a sour taste in the mouth but we need to talk about the value we place in having somewhere online that is transparent and how conversant or how we enable our students and staff to be more conversant with the digital intermediaries that seem to govern our daily lives because after all google and wikipedia have this symbiotic relationship and search is the way we live now and it google's dominance is undisputed obviously so i'll not talk anymore i just think uh the challenge is for universities and libraries to prepare the next generation to be informed digital uh responsible online citizens so you can swap out libraries for universities and it still works so i'll over to them oh it's because i've got the powerpoint little tech help yeah i think it's a really cool project to have because it's collaborative it's very very real um i think it also explores some really really important parts of research such as um practicing finding sources researching a difficult topic um writing an article thinking about planning and structuring um all that kind of thing like their skills that anyone's going to need as a medic um it's i mean crucial it's a vital part of being a doctor being able to explain a patient's illness to them so it's always useful to practice writing maybe really scientific in-depth things in a more understandable way um because yeah not only does it help other people to understand it but it also makes sure that you know it too law forms the basis for democracy and i believe that it is a democrat part of our democratic rights is that we should make information open and knowledgeable to all people um and i believe that editing Wikipedia comes into that mission there's a law and technology society um for which i designed a law wiki project law edited on and so i identified articles that had focus on technology law and quite a lot of them that need to be added or edited tend to go with intellectual property law so i created this event just so um students can kind of get a first-hand experience of what it looks like to edit wikipedia what it looks like to add information to wikipedia when you are writing in wikipedia articles and or editing the articles um you're of course putting these legal research skills into practice but not only that is that you're writing the you're writing articles with the law focus geared towards all to people from all different kinds of backgrounds not just lawyers and others with the legal mind i approached you in and said that i was a member of the history society at the university of edinburgh that i was organizing their academic events for the upcoming academic year and i really wanted to broaden out the type of events that we were doing um both in terms of the type of history that we were representing because we did quite a lot of political history events and very few uh social history events and events related to underrepresented groups but also the type of events that we were doing because we put on a lot of lectures and some panel discussions but there was very few opportunities for people to directly engage in history in a way that wasn't just a sort of passive listening to it and so running a wikipedia edit on seemed like a perfect way to combine these two things it not only shows people that their degree has relevance um it also helps improve a resource that many people use uh universities are meant to stimulate academically so in many cases i will read something in a reading for a lecture i will listen to my lecture speak about a specific issue that maybe it's not in wikipedia and i will feel inspired to make an article about it uh our lecturer mentioned uh Jamila Bobakwa um a Algerian activist uh for for the independence of Algeria and she didn't have an article in Spanish so what i would do in that case is create the article being a wikipedia for me it's about being an advocate or an activist of knowledge it's about being able to what matters to you be represented and be accessible to more people um and produce an inspiration to more people i want to take what we have been doing here at the university and take it back home when i return home whether it's for the holidays or after i'm done with my studies because you're broadening the horizons of others when they uh when they see these articles and the knowledge you've posted as well as your opening doors for your readers you're possibly improving representation and i think that's something we really should be working on um increasing representations of different languages especially when you look at the number of for example Arabic speakers and speakers of the other major languages compared to the number of articles they have it's um it's really surprising it's a stark difference i was introduced to one live one ref um it's something you do to celebrate wikipedia's birthday the idea is that if everyone adds one reference wikipedia will have a lot more references so i chose to add references to Scottish psychology and it's basically a game so you get you know it's sent to this article and you see the text and you're like need to find it and um when i found the first reference i got very very excited um the best part was that i was also able to add more information so not only was i able to add the reference i was also able to expand on that point um i also think it was extremely easy to do uh the referencing was really interesting i've really realized how uh good it is that wikipedia has so many open access sources and wikipedia is so much more than just wikipedia itself does all of wikipedia stuff in general so um one of the things i've found really helpful is for example i we study a lot of brains and brains are really confusing organs and there's this animation on one of those pages that like shows a brain that's like rotating and it shows the brain part and i've always wondered why none of my academics use it because it's actually openly licensed in a way that you could use it in a lecture and i think wikipedia in that sense offers um a lot of different media so you could easily work into teaching having pictures of things on wikipedia pages and adding more than potentially just text and a few references really makes um an article much more interesting um so for example i added a picture of um the university library to that wikipedia page i also do think that where then wikipedia has a really good space is that academia focuses way too little on how to communicate you know world-leading research to the layman people right i'm Athena Franzana and i am a final european PhD student at the university of Edinburgh um aida lovelace day is the day uh where we celebrate aida lovelace and it's a it's a day that we celebrate all women in stem in science technology fields and women in stem are underrepresented and maybe the lack of role models is one reason why and maybe if we can change that we can change the the way the future generations look at science and technology as a career path i participated on all the activities and i also wrote an article about elizabeth ellenor field who is one of the 19 female chemists who petition to be fellows of the chemistry society when you're a student the biggest problem is is actually doing practical translations i mean we get a bunch of different uh things to do you know excerpts of books or or whatever that we translate and talk about with our fellow classmates and our teachers but it's you know it's just for us or it's just for our teachers we're not actually out there doing something that affects other people or other people will read so to be given the opportunity to translate something practical that will end up being read by people and and used by people i think just that motivation itself was was the biggest positive of this of this project um the uh yeah i mean thinking that that it would have an end reader i think was was probably the biggest the biggest thing and so obviously then my actual translation of it was effective because i was thinking wow this is going to be read by people around the world you know so i have to well not only do i have to be professional about it but i have to you know think of them as my target audience and not just please a teacher or whatever the case may be so i think that was uh one of the biggest positives for me and yeah just the practical translation work you know just getting an opportunity to translate something that i was interested in um on a on a website and that that i use regularly i think was was a big positive yeah so all of those things were were wonderful about this project it's been a really rewarding experience and a way of engaging students in how to access and use databases how to abstract the information from those and how to use those to develop a web-based resource so if you're thinking about it i would say definitely have a go so how to summarize two two years up in one minute um basically um we had three assignments in year one we doubled that in year two we are now into year three and uh what else can i tell you um the library and university collections now have a new digitization strategy for edinburgh university that includes contributed to wikipedia and uh we also have a new strategy that for for the next four years wikipedia edsig will be part of our athena swan commitment in sort of correcting underrepresentation of women in stem fields by making more visible role models online um so there that's probably all i have time for but there we go three wikipedia classroom assignments we're now working with digital sociology global health don't cite wikipedia right wikipedia loads of skills and yeah i've that's about it um if you have any questions i'm very happy to answer them but i take tim burners lee's point about the whole nature of the open web that we need to rethink our relationship with it and if it will work it's not working we need to look at the systems and whether they're actually helping humanity are they being constructive or destructive and i think we could probably argue for wikipedia being constructive thank you thanks just to hear two questions um i would really come from the conversation that we had yesterday why still teachers academics question the validity of wikipedia as a source of information but they keep promoting during facebook groups and sir um we're gonna have this conversation later if anyone has a question because uh the next keynote is approaching so one more time uh anyone oh no you're of course you you you are having a reason to just want a second i'm great talk thank you i was compelled i was interested when you were showing one of the animated gifts this idea of the citation hunt and do you have you built tools to make it actually like how is that working do you have a tool to make it easier for students to cite or explain the process i was just interested um there's a developer called Guillaume gone Calvars i'm probably saying his name horribly wrong but he he uh developed citation hunt um and it's used as part of wikipedia's annual one lib one ref campaign so every january they run this campaign to celebrate wikipedia's birthday and they ask one librarian to add one reference to wikipedia to wikipedia so um but i think we can all add references to wikipedia and it's actually quite fun if you filter it to a category or wikipedia that you're actually interested in or knowledge you'll about or care about and yeah you just click through it'll suggest this little snippet and it'll click through to the page and if you're not interested just click next and it'll suggest another little snippet it's just such a low barrier way to get in besides offering articles we used it in mexico that people had the sponge yeah well just to pay credits allen and brian because we've ripped and nicked their plot idea mercilessly and we just want we've developed this site called wiki games which ann mary came over and did with you guys right and just little short fun tasks as a way of a way into contributing to wikipedia so it's not presented as an onerous thing or an intimidating thing that some people find because once they have a go they get hooked and it's just getting people in the room to give it a go and just have that conversation with them as well and that's what i find is that eight times eight nine times out of ten we come out of convert with converts every single time i just posted the citation okay thank you so much thanks for being here