 I'm Belinda Spry, I'm the Executive Officer of Wikimedia Australia. So thank you, Ewan, for joining our session tonight. It's fantastic to have you with us. We're really looking forward to your presentation. I'll just give a quick bio before we head into the session. So I'd like to introduce you to Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at University of Edinburgh. The Wikimedian in Residence program has done absolutely amazing things like create resources on YouTube, integrate Wiki projects into classes such as create translations and add to Wikisource. We do have a link that I will put in the chat for those who want to read more. But otherwise we'll hand over to you and now and we're looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you. But basically our main website for the residency is at tinyurl.com forward slash wiki dash UOE, UOE for University of Edinburgh. And I'll explain a bit more about how it came about and what we've been up to. Okay, so why does Edinburgh have a Wikimedian in Residence? Well, we've got this vision that kind of suggests that we should. So where our graduates and the knowledge we discover with our partners make the world a better place. And our teaching and research is to be relevant to society and to be diverse inclusive and accessible. So we have a picture of old college that one of our students, Mahaila Bodlovic took and that is on call. And we also have what we believe is a shared mission with Wikimedia where University of Edinburgh has its mission as to be the creation and creation of knowledge and obviously Wikimedia wants to have everyone be freely sharing the sum of all knowledge. But how are universities walking the walk in that respect, in that respect, what are they doing that's not putting information into silos. So one of the ways is to sort of like look at teaching learning and research and working with Wikimedia. And we won an award a couple of years ago, the Higher Herald Education Awards for innovative use of teaching in forward period in the curriculum. But it started way back in 2014 and it started with students demanding that resources be made open. So way back in 2015, there was the national debate about how to make Scotland a more fairer, more inclusive, better society in the lead up to the Scottish independence referendum. But our student society user also that year challenged our senior managers at the university to make our education resources open licensed and openly available, not just for the students at the university but for the wider world as well. And that resulted senior managers responding with an apology about open education resources, and it was approved by our learning and teaching committee in January 2016. It's informative and permissive, and it encourages staff and students to use create and publish open education resources to enhance the quality of the student expense. So we have staff who manage this OER service who help colleagues make informed decisions about creating and using OER at the University of Edinburgh. And there's our website open.ed. We thought open university had the best domain name, but we thought open.ed was the next best. And it was all because our team manager, Dr Melissa Highton, was aware that there was a lot of work going on in the Wikimedia universe that she as a university IT manager didn't know about. And she thought, I'm going to decide to find out about this so she hosted an editathon to trial it out, which was on the Edinburgh seven, who were the first female undergraduate students to study at a British university. And there was a riot outside the Surgeons Hall in Edinburgh, when they tried to dare to study medicine. And so we made sure that they all had pages on Wikipedia in this editing event and we borrowed a Wikimedia in residence from Museum and Gallery Scotland. Dr Sarah Thomas to allow us to hold this event. I'm excited as an example of good practice in preparation for our Athena Swan Silver Award. But we also because we're a research institution, we wanted to research what was going on in these events. So we invited Professor Alison little John to come and evaluate what was going on in an editing event. And whether there was genuine authentic learning going on that wasn't just a gimmick or that there was conversations and learning happening in these events related to copyright neutral point of view, what is a reliable source academic referencing and how information gets online, open access, all of the things that we want our students and staff to be cognizant of. And another what we found as well was there was the motivating factor that learning becomes personal and triggers forms of agency. And there's a number of papers that Alison's written over the years about that editing event as a disruptive way of working in teaching and learning that is impactful. So that helped legitimate my position as a sort of started off as a one year part time role two and a half days a week. So important we thought it was going to support our institutional commitments to open knowledge information literacy, developing digital skills among our graduates and supporting a quality diversity and inclusion in improving representation online. So we see it as a multiple return on investment, and my role is to position alongside other learning technologists, academic support librarians and web developer teams. My role is essentially to raise awareness of Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to design and deliver digital skills events to get colleagues in the room to discuss and learn about how to benefit from and contribute to these free and open open knowledge resources. So I go as a sort of traveling salesman and Avon lady around the university initially, and he's working with colleagues at places like our Center for regenerative medicine where they wanted to create more information about stem cells. But essentially what we we found was in getting people into the room we created a lot of open knowledge nodes. And once we planted the seed of an idea. More colleagues were brought in. They came back with ideas about how to work with Wikipedia in their own context, and it kept developing all through the years and brought in more open knowledge nodes more people committed to understanding about Wikipedia and how it could be used in learning and research. There we go. So over the years we've worked with about between 10 and 20 different course programs but these are the main ones we work with reasonably consistently reproductive biology has been run since 2015 every year. We've been asked creating new pages about reproductive medicine world Christianity, do a literature review assignment over 12 weeks translation studies 2000 word translations of featured articles every semester, public health digital sociology design Korean studies they created a great page on comfort women in the arts recently and global health challenges do a group online task, improving stub articles on natural and man made disasters by 1000 words. So what teaching fun. And we've decided to sort of evidence what we do. And we've created a booklet in 2020 of case studies of how Wikipedia is being used in UK education, so that other educators can see. We're not just sort of like doing work in isolation anymore we're showcasing how anyone can do this work. So we've got five case studies from University of Edinburgh in there but also case studies from Imperial College London sterling Sheffield Swansea and more. We've got a short link on our, well open dot eds dot act UK wikimedia in education on our open ed site. It's also in Commons, and we're writing new case studies to include so there's 14 in there currently, but I'm adding about another six, and hoping to get a new digital booklet launched next year. I'm going to include mention of our Scotland slavery and black history project and more recent assignments in looking at improving Islamic art and science on Wikipedia. The Scotland slave in black history was a, an extracurricular project we ran with students of the history society to examine Scotland's legacy in terms of the Atlantic slave trade and writing new pages with about a positive examination of black history, creating new pages about the USEU in Glasgow and more. And here is a Philadelphia born African American intellectual at the University from 1858 to 1860. Yep, so that's the global health challenges assignment. I'm really happy with that we presented on this project in an extended session. Because we've been working with them for the last three years, and they, they really see the benefit of getting online students to really collaborate and think about their learning in a group task. So it took about four or five weeks to improve these short stub articles about such topics as the SAM floods. Professor Debbie Sridhar is very well known at the University who is being an expert in COVID, and she advises of the Scottish government but she also sort of sees the benefit of getting public knowledge out there about public health topics. Debbie gets her master's students to contribute about 180 to 200 words from recent review literature on such topics as obesity and anything you come to think of that's really important in public health matters. Like I say, enriching Wikipedia content is a pathway to improve health literacy, and the course leaders on reproductive biology have changed over the years but they all see the value in getting their science students their medical students their students all in the same room collaborating with a postgraduate tutor and putting learning about good quality digital research in the field of medicine and how to communicate their subject to a lay audience. And they see that one of the main benefits of working with Wikipedia in this early semester workshop that we do in every September. But we also work with wiki data because we are charged by the Scottish government to create a new data literate workforce to support Scotland's growing digital economy, and we know that data is the new bacon. So wiki data is a big part of supporting growing that data literate workforce and getting the 10,000 data literate students that we want over the next 10 years. And in the design informatics course they hold a data fair every October, where they get problem holders who have data sets, like from the Scottish government or national records of Scotland or the National Library of Scotland, or from different parts of the university to pitch in three minutes, a data problem and a data challenge to master students on the design informatics course. So they work in groups of three to take this data challenge and this real world data set and do something creative and visualize the data in an interesting and stimulating way of the course of five, six weeks. And one of the projects we sort of have consistently worked with is the university's survey of Scottish witchcraft database, which was stored in a Microsoft access database way back in 2003, and was left relatively static and well respected but not well used. And, like I say, teaching data science is really important to use real world data sets so we charged our students to think creatively about what could we do if we took the very textual information stored in rows and rows and columns and columns of access database and took that and put it into wiki data and visualized it as linked open data, particularly if we could plot them on a map, if we could take 800 place names and geolocate them on a map. Again, we wanted to surface what we did and give students opportunities particularly during lockdown when there was a bit of a hiring freeze at the university. So during lockdown we hired Hannah Rothman to create a website for us to pull all the how to resources of engaging with wiki data and Wikipedia all into one place. We created this website tiny url.com forward slash wiki dash uo e pulling all the best resources that we could find out there about teaching Wikipedia teaching wiki data, but also creating short and hopefully polished. We created one to two minute or one to three minute videos about how to add a citation how to add an image and open licensing them to embed them on a website to embed them in YouTube, but allow other educators to make use of them if they want to run online or in person workshops. Internships are a great way of students to learn and get employed and get experience. So we've held a number of internships over the years. Emma was our first there in the sort of yellow cardigan. And she was a geography student that we asked to hunt down all the place names in the survey of Scottish witchcraft database and geolocate them on a map. And then we had Laura as our women in red intern. And then Hannah created our website that she's in the bottom right. And resort those 20 resources working from home at her parents house in lockdown she did an enormous power of work and one an open education global award for her work. And then we expanded that the following year with Erin, writing about resources about how to engage with wiki source and wiki media Commons and clear to make the wiki data resources much more evident and how to support equality diversity and inclusion through the wiki media projects. And then we've also had student experience grant projects where Sean Eleanor Kirstie worked over 12 weeks one day a week to improve LGBT history black history and gender history and had a big end of project event where they got other people to to crowd crowdsource the work that they prepped. But we've had two new interns last summer Maggie and Joseph to improve our map of witches website because lots of people are engaging it and we wanted to make sure it was fit for purpose and add more data from the survey of Scottish witchcraft. And I now need a new intern to make sure that that data is robust and does what it's expected, when you hit the results you you get what you want. So, because we've added so much data now and I now need to sort of make sure it's quality assured. And there's Maggie presenting at an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival. There was a new book called hex by Jenny Fagan about an accused witch Gillis Duncan. And we were, we've been invited to do a presentation at next year's Edinburgh Book Fest to again talk about this map of witches work that we've done. The Edinburgh Ward is something we're really excited about and it's a way into our second year. And what this does is this this credits students for doing 50 to 80 hours extracurricular work that will help them develop with a personal professional and academic graduate contribution competencies that we want their university experience to help them view because we know that a degree is often not enough, and that we know that students are doing often doing a lot outside of the university, a lot outside of their studies to develop themselves. So we want to accredit them for doing that work. So we have a digital skills award that's called digital volunteering with Wikipedia. It runs from October to end of March and the students pick a topic on Wikipedia. They want to research that they can deliver a demonstrable and significant improvement and impact on and they pick three graduate skills that they want to develop over that time. Whether it's critical thinking or problem solving or confidence and assertiveness. They pick three skills that they're going to evidence that they are going to focus on as part of the award, but they're also going to deliver a significant demonstrable improvement to Wikipedia. And these are some of the topics they were interested to write about climate change, LGBTQ plus history, female artists, South Korea COVID-19 stem mental health, contemporary artists, African diaspora and more. We've got videos of the students and staff talking about their experience working with Wikipedia and it is largely, I would say, all positive. But if you want to find out more you can email me. And these are just some documents about some of the work that's been done on the, the Emperor Ward like Helen Chadwick, who was seen as a young British artist teacher only, but we made sure that her artworks and her artistry were were added to Wikipedia as part of the award. Anyway, those, I can show you the video of student staff responses but I'm conscious that I might have talked too long. But I will stop at that point. I think you're spot on you and I think you actually got one or two minutes to go but I think people's internet might fall over if we tried to play a video at this point. If you have links, that would be fantastic. We would, I'm sure people would love to watch the video and see some of what you're talking about in action. But thank you. That was absolutely amazing. I'm really interested in the digital volunteering component that sounds amazing, quite incredible. I'll open it up to people who might have questions and I'm aware we're literally just about at the end of our meeting. But if people want to stay on and hopefully you and you don't mind staying just for a few moments more to answer some questions. Yeah, I'll open it up to everyone who would like to ask you in a question. Sure you and what resistance did you find at the start of the Wikipedia residents program from particularly from faculty. I mean, obviously there's the usual ones are Wikipedia is terrible you can't trust it, but were there more other nuanced objections or suspicions of the program. If you're talking about 13,000 staff, there's there's enough staff that get that in that you. We, there was a lecturer in theology Alex Chow who was a long time he was a developer in his previous life, and he edited Wikipedia and he was very excited to try it out. So he approached me translation studies. I approached them and said, you know, we've got this content translation tool. Can can we do some work together and they were, they were looking at different ways of improving on their course content anyway, and swapping out components that weren't really working for them in terms of the learning outcomes. Yeah, you're right there are those and they are still sort of skeptical and other have preconceived ideas so, but what we did was we tried to run events when they could attend. When they might be happy to attend during like a semester break or evening or lunchtime sessions, or running like presentations during forums that were already happening at the university, and just piggybacking on them. We just had the conversation and stimulated ideas and challenged some of those preconceptions and we planted the seeds of, and they came back to us like I say the this idea of open knowledge nodes was sort of created over time supportive and yeah challenging those assumptions was important and getting people in the room to have that conversation was important. So that that worked, but the one thing that came out to me is that one lecturer in the School of Business felt that why would I want to contribute to Wikipedia when it is essentially misogynist. And felt that it was. They'd sort of seen the sort of news articles that Wikipedia had a largely sort of male sort of tech background sort of in terms of its editorship and didn't have enough biographies of women and they felt it was a toxic culture. And that sort of that stimulated quite a wide debate, because they hit reply all to the whole college. And they also said that I don't have time to contribute, because I'm a single parent. I think that started a debate about whether male single parents or female single parents would have more more time at the university so there were. There were some interesting times but the upshot was that I was told no more college wide emails, I was sort of like held accountable for the fact that someone else had hit reply all time and started this sort of gender, who has more to do a female academic or a male academic. Basically that's what happened. But yeah, communication at the university has been challenging, because it's such a big university and getting, but yeah, we've developed ways of sort of not having that problem and challenging people that have, you know, you have to be. You have to be in the in Wikipedia to help change any cultural problems in that way. The absence is not the answer. A follow up question we in New Zealand we have a couple of lecturers that are setting Wikipedia assignments to students in class. Big problems with those they tend to be ghastly the lecturers do not actually edit Wikipedia or understand themselves so the students are drafting things in Microsoft Word and uploading them to Wikipedia the day before the assignments do, after which they never edit again. How would you tackle those sorts of problems with the course mean what would you do to change that culture. It's interesting because there was a lecture that when I first started, and I was like oh you've done a Wikipedia assignment, and she said yeah but it was a disaster. And I would never do it again. My my my thinking is that you have to set it up to succeed. And also you have to do a bit of wiki Elf work at the end as well. There's sort of bookending that I do so like I make sure that I'm trying to let the lecturer know what they, they have particular learning outcomes they want to achieve. And if they can explain it to me. I can say what would work well in a sort of wikipedia context, and sort of, but I don't know if you can unpick something that's been badly set up for if you come in late. So I recommend just going in and just having making sure sitting down and sort of developing the assignment between the two of you. Do the lecturers themselves have to have Wikipedia editing experience to be able to assess how well the students have met the task. I don't think so. I think that they can, I think they can assess it from a pure sort of academic point of view as well but they sometimes lean on me to sort of see what kind of mechanisms do you have in the wikipedia media universe to help me assess that so we use the dashboard there to sort of like show them the authorship highlighting tool word count and number of citations added helps them quantify the edits and they, they do sort of like to assess if certain group members have contributed more than others but I think we can, we sort of pair it sort of the work of the dashboard with like a rubric or a sort of peer review task so where the group members can assess each other as well and assess how the group performed. And so we would, we like a reflective component that that is done outside of wikipedia. Have you had any assistance from wiki education in the States because I know they normally only work with us in Canada I think any of their resources been useful. I mean, there's, I haven't had much consistent interaction with wiki education because they tend to sort of like just focus on their, the American context, but they, they, they do have some resources PDFs that I've made use of over the years, and sort of like their booklet on case studies was what I used as a sort of blueprint for creating the our own booklet of UK case studies. So yeah, you know, cherry pick in what you can find so I've tried to put everything that I use on our website. Cheers. Anyone else have any questions for you. Yeah, I was wondering about. If you've heard, I think you have had success in using wiki source in a teaching environment. Has that gone well, like it seems a less controversial way to get people involved. No, no, I wouldn't say wikis. Well, we've worked with students to improve resources on wiki source to try and like lessen the barriers for engagement it's still. We've had more luck with wiki source in terms of our collections. And the National Library of Scotland's collections like Gavin will show at the National Library of Scotland did a project. During lockdown where he could he was a digitization manager of National Library of Scotland we couldn't get the staff into the building to do the digitizing because everyone was at home social distancing. So instead he just said like we've got these 3000 Scottish chapter books. He just teach you and work with the wiki source community, get and get the 60 digitization staffed all working from home on wiki source to digitize these books. And fortunately we've poached him back from the national National Library of Scotland, because he used to be at the University of Edinburgh library anyway so he's, he's our go to man for wiki source work now. At the, the library and collections and we're hoping to do more projects together. It's just making, he doesn't often get a lot of time to do it. So there's not a consistent approach with wiki source. I think I would be interested if there were courses we could work with that would be interested in that. Yeah, that's fine I think we're over time anyway so thanks Kelly. But yeah, I'm happy to sort of engage with in like let people sort of pick the project they would like to work with in sort of like just explore through conversation how it might work in an academic context. It's more library and collections work with wiki source. But yeah, I'm still trying to improve the resources to make it nice and easy to sort of engage with we've got some new video resources about that you've also developed as well Sam, like we've made use of. We might have time for just one more quick question if anyone has a quick if it's possible to have a quick question. This is also interesting. No, we're all we're all done. Great. Well, thank you so much you and I've got huge amounts of information from that it's really, really interesting. I think some of us might be going to send you a few emails and keep in touch. Yeah, that would be great. We're certainly looking here in Australia at our training but no Amanda and I and have just recently had some conversations with Fiona Romeo as well around, you know, what can we do with universities and what can we do with, you know, getting students more active in this space and getting getting lecturers on site and getting faculty on site so it's been really interesting hearing what you're doing and some of the, you know, leaps ahead that you're making in this area it's been, you know, hard work over many years but it certainly seems to be achieving some fantastic outcomes for the university and for wiki media as well so. Yeah, I think there's a there's a fertile space but you know, the pace of change in academic context is quite slow and and can be quite fast in certain respects but if you're talking about curriculum transformation and in drip feeding ideas, it sort of does take a little while for things to germinate it but I would say there is a sort of fertile space in terms of student collaboration and the kind of graduate competencies they want we want to inspire. And they do a lot of the lecturers do like the fact that wiki media allows postgraduate students to work with undergraduate students and that sort of cross level. Opportunity is exciting and there aren't always that many mechanisms to allow that to happen. It's very sort of linear flat sort of like they all work at the same age level and the same year level, a lot of the time, but yeah, the Edinburgh award allows us to do a little bit more of that. Yeah, that's great. And I think as well thinking about all these students graduating and going out into institutions and carrying on you know this hopefully this passion for open access information open link data. You know, you're going to start to see more requests coming through from institutions as well which, you know, which these graduates will be taking it with them into practice in the workplace which is, you know, we'll get there. Yeah, yeah, it does it does. I would say that the students that we have engaged with are still positive and that would they come back years afterwards and say like they still enjoyed it and it was one of the best things they did. During their time at the university and we do have a PhD researcher Eleanor Capaldi who worked with us on a student experience grant earlier this year on LGBT history. She's now finishing her PhD over the University of Glasgow and looking at she's running a workshop tomorrow, no, Friday at the University of Glasgow about how images and artworks can be transformed and sort of used from Wikipedia and to help promote LGBT history. So she's she's continuing to sort of like look at how Wikimedia can sort of be better represented online. Amazing, really exciting stuff happening. It's great to hear about so really want to thank you for hopefully not getting up too early. But we appreciate you your time. It's really fantastic for us in our community over here to hear about it. Yep. No, I was just going to say it's like I'm half Australian myself so like it's nice to serve into to support the Australian community like and give give something a bit back my mom's a bridge from Brizzy. Wow, fantastic. Yeah. And not forgetting our New Zealand Cousins of it might Michael. Of course. Give us a wave. But yeah, thank you. That's great. That's really good. Good to know you've got a connection here. So yeah, fantastic. Okay, so thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us tonight. I'm sorry we've had a few tech issues and a few adjustments. So our next meeting will be held in January. We haven't quite finalised all the presentations for that yet. So if you have something, please feel free to get in touch. James and I'll probably be casting around looking for interesting speakers or interesting projects to present on. Thank you everyone for your time tonight. It opened for a little while if people want to hang around for just some casual chat. But for those of you that need to head off, thank you. And we'll see you again soon.