 Welcome to another Domain's 21 Track Session. I have the privilege of being here today with Ewan McAndrew from University of Edinburgh. Ewan, welcome. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks. Let's get the show on the road. Absolutely. You'll be talking about Wikipedia in the classroom in the new normal, student-led activism promoting knowledge equity, which is pretty awesome. I'll remove myself. You can start sharing your slides. And we'll get going. Great. Thanks, Jim. Hello, everyone. Hopefully, you can all see this. This is Wikipedia in the classroom in the new normal student-led activism promoting knowledge equity and sustainable development goal for equality education. Our stories start way back in 2014 when the world was a very different place and a national debate was taking place in Scotland about how to make a better, fairer, more inclusive society in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum. This was also the year that the University of Edinburgh's Student Association encouraged the university's senior managers to explore how learning materials could be made open, not only for students within the university but across Scotland and the wider world. Student engagement and co-creation have been fundamental aspects of open education resources work, OERs, at the university ever since, with the role of the Wikimedia in residence positioned alongside other learning technologists and digital skills trainers to further embed open practice at the university. A multiple return on investment, the role acts as a free resource available to all staff and students and supports multiple key institutional commitments to sharing open knowledge, information, literacy, digital skills and equality, diversity and inclusion. We've been working at supporting teaching and learning at the University of Edinburgh now for over five years, working year on year with positive results and we've now grown to 10 to 12 course programs and the need for having a neutral accessible platform online where you can gain access to knowledge online for free. It has never been more vital in this era of hybrid teaching, remote working and home schooling. This time last year we showcased a new booklet of case studies in UK education, demonstrating how the free and open Wikimedia projects were being used in higher and secondary education as a blueprint for further knowledge activism but in recognizing that this is the new normal, Classics undergraduate. Hannah Rothman worked for 12 weeks last summer. To look and assess all the Wikipedia and Wikidata and all the other resources we had and improve them and make them accessible. And to be embedded on virtual learning environments for anyone to use on an open license. The idea being that we want to lower the barriers for engagement. I'm going to let Hannah now speak a little about the work she did to make Wikipedia easier to learn in this new normal. The goal of my 12 week internship working with the Wikimedian in residence, Eon McCandrie, was to make Wikipedia and Wikidata more accessible. This is including making how to training videos for Wikipedia and Wikidata and planning and creating a website on EdWeb where these training materials can be accessed. Wikimedia projects and especially Wikipedia have become more important during this global lockdown. It is important that people have access to digital skills and are able to access the immense amount of information on the internet and know how to approach and analyse this information critically. 85.7% of students in 2016 said that they used Wikipedia in some aspect in their work and many, including myself and my friends, use Wikipedia as a springboard to go on and access other information. During this time, Wikipedia has had a surge of page views and become a crucial source of information people around the world and for homeschooling. For example, the English language page for COVID-19 had more than 73 million page views by July 30, 2020 and there were more than 5,200 new Wikipedia pages on COVID-19 in the first few months of the pandemic. These statistics show how important Wikipedia is for people as a source of information during a global pandemic. I also attended sessions run by Women in STEM whose aim it is to edit, improve or add articles about female scientists on Wikipedia. Wikipedia also has an issue with much of its information being dominated by the global North. So the sessions for Women in STEM also looked at improving or adding articles of female scientists from the global South. This is a list of some of the videos we have made over the summer. So as you can see, we've tried to break down each step on Wikipedia and Wikidata into bite-sized and manageable chunks for a beginner and to make sure our videos don't go much above five minutes. For example, how to add a citation, how to format on Wikipedia, how to add a heading for references, how to add an item to Wikidata. However, there are a few long ones as this will always be inevitable. So I have really enjoyed getting to know Wikipedia, Wikidata and the people who work on these projects. I have attended Edithons, which aim to improve diversity on Wikipedia, including the Women in STEM Edithon. I've also attended some talks from the Celtic Knot Conference. This conference is based on promoting Celtic and Indigenous languages on Wikimedia. And this work is really important in preserving these languages, especially as some studies have shown that some of them are threatened with extinction within the next 10 years. We needed to adjust the resources we used and the way in which we operated. But the projects still work. They were suitable for face to face and remote learning. In a time when many have felt disconnected and powerless, this presentation is seeking to showcase stories of student empowerment, providing exemplars of how students have engaged with researching and publishing their scholarship online in a real world application of their teaching and learning, particularly taking the knowledge that's been concentrated in the hands of the few within the ivory tower and those marginalized groups, histories and perspectives that have been previously excluded by structures of power and privilege. Students on the global health challenges postgraduate certificate online, they collaborate in groups to evaluate short stub articles of less than 300 words related to a natural or man-made disaster and proceed to research the topic, discussing with each other online and improving each article's coverage by a thousand words by the end of the four week assignment. We've also worked with Professor Devi Sridhar and Dr. Felix Stein on the masses in public health where master students on that course added, improved or created new content for global public health related articles and showed how crucial it is to make medicine and information on global health more accessible. Indeed, a new study published in the British Medical Journal concluded that enriching Wikipedia content is a powerful way to improve health literacy. We've worked with students on the reproductive medicine BSE honors program for the last five years and students come together, science students, medical students, intercalating students all come together to collaboratively research a reproductive medical term not yet represented on Wikipedia working in a three hour research workshop with academic support librarians. They then put the article together in a second workshop and publish it before doing a short oral presentation on their group efforts. Translation studies master's program is another program we've worked with every year for the last five years where students gain meaningful published practice ahead of the world of work through translating a high quality Wikipedia article in one language and producing 1500 to 2000 words each semester into a different language Wikipedia and they peer assess each other's efforts. A new course is one on the history of art where fourth year history of art students were asked to imagine they had been hired as consultants for a major museum. Their mission was to use their art history research and writing skills to improve the public's knowledge of Islamic science and the occult in advance of an exhibition. They were to research and improve an article by editing and adding new text to existing articles, adding a bibliography and in addition to revising texts and adding citations to existing articles the students were asked to illustrate them with images of scientific instruments and illustrated manuscripts. The students appreciate how the editing process had gotten them thinking about knowledge dissemination. And thanks to their efforts Wikipedia's freely available knowledge is now a bit more diverse and globally representative and as one student commented they really love the Wikipedia project feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world if in a small way. And students are coming to us to suggest collaborations. The Scotland Slavery in Black History Project was a project with a student history society which reexamined both the legacy of Scotland's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade but also counterbalancing this with trying to also produce a more positive re-examination of Black history in Scotland as well. 16,000 words were added over the project and I'll let Lucy Parfit, president of the Edinburgh History Society speak a little bit more about her motivations and the organisation of the project. So the big things that the society had to really think about and consider when running events of this nature which engage with sensitive issues was making sure that we got in consultation and sought advice from people and groups who had really good subject knowledge but also awareness of the political climate in which we would be running these events. Obviously we're a predominantly white committee in university so we wanted to really do it justice. So we managed to get some really great advice from a group called Black Ed who talked to us about racial literacy training and looking into the motivations of participants for getting involved with the project as well as Lisa Williams from the Edinburgh African Caribbean Association. So this input was really helpful to the society. It was also important the students understood how knowledge was created, curated and contested online with controversial figures like Henry Dundas role in the transatlantic slave trade something of a battleground on Wikipedia about whether he did or didn't delay the abolition of slavery. Here's Katie Reinman speaking a little bit more about how that editing that page worked as part of the project. My name is Katie and I am a student at the University of Edinburgh. I joined the Wikipedia workshop on Scotland's slavery and Black History because I thought it sounded relevant to today's issues and I wanted to contribute something worthwhile. I was particularly interested in the Wikipedia aspect because Wikipedia is so well known in which it is such a large audience. It's so accessible. And I thought it was important that his pages, especially on figures involved in Black History were up to date and factual and offered a total view on their subjects. I thought that last point was especially important when working on the page of figures like Henry Dundas because Dundas is such a noteworthy figure in Scottish history and has been the recent subject of controversy and it's important that we knew what we were talking about going in. I worked on this project with Diane Payton, professor of Caribbean history and she has an extensive knowledge of Dundas and history of the Atlantic slave trade in the British presence in the Caribbean. With her knowledge, we were able to add more nuance to the page on Dundas' role in government and in delaying the abolition of slavery. But we also found that Wikipedia is not just your average encyclopedia and it doesn't work like an academic publication. You're working in tandem with a whole community of other editors and your audience is the general public. Dundas' page gets a lot of traffic and as we were working, other people would come in and edit and remove our work or say that we were painting Dundas in too unfavorable of a light or we're not being neutral. So we had to be careful with our wording and had to localize the edits that we wanted to make. We couldn't overhaul the whole page and we really had to make sure that we were changing and putting in the most important details so that they couldn't get deleted and also so that our message could come across succinctly. In the end, we did have to compromise because Wikipedia is a shared space but I think we did important work and added things to the Dundas' page that had been missing and fixed other parts to overall better illustrate the complexity of his life and of his legacy. We were very keen that this volunteer student-led project shared inspirational stories of Black histories at the same time and here's Lucy gonna speak about one of the pages that was written about the Edinburgh graduate, Jesse Ewing Glasgow. So the project that I was most involved with was the creation of the Jesse Ewing Glasgow page. So he was an American born, African American man and he came over to Scotland to Edinburgh to study and he was a very impressive student and wrote extensively on American politics. So things like the Harpers Ferry Raid and extensively on the African American experience and was very important in forming a sort of Black transatlantic intellectual community. The reason why I thought this was an important page to have on Wikipedia was that oftentimes when we learn about Black history, the transatlantic slave trade very much comes into the forefront and whilst obviously it's really important that we broaden public knowledge and perception of the slave trade and things like abolition, what oftentimes gets lost is the celebration of Black achievements and Black individuals who in the face of adversity were incredibly creative and accomplished. So I think that's really important to build on that body of work in public sort of perceptions of Black history. Students are learning that they have agency and are intrinsically motivated by this to become activists of knowledge as they can see that these assignments can not only support their learning in terms of learning about academic referencing, copyright, plagiarism, online collaboration, database use, critical source analysis and writing for a lay audience. But it also supports the understanding of their discipline globally with a tangible, impactful outcomes that they can be proud of. We need to stop thinking of Wikipedia as a problem in education, as something that we can only passively consume at your peril. Our experience of the last five years doesn't bear that out at all. Our students don't feel that way. Wikipedia is useful. Academically useful as a place to orientate yourself on a subject and begin that clarification and starting point for understanding. Now age 20, we need to view Wikipedia as something to engage with as a form of learning technology. Like all the other learning technologies we work with in this new normal can support learning, teaching and assessment. And it offers so much through actively engaging and contributing to these free and open projects. I'll leave the last word with our student, Hannah Rothman, who created these resources for other educators. Within universities, many staff and students are in excellent positions to contribute, improve and edit articles. They can access resources, they have specific subject expertise. They could be valuable editors and empowered knowledge activists. It's a choice to value and engage in this work. And so now it's up to you. Wow, thank you very much, Ewan. That was a wide, when you said, Wikipedia is now 20 years old, I almost dropped out of my chair. I don't know, it's been around for this long and we still don't take it seriously as ridiculous. So thanks for making it clear why it's so valuable within the context we work. Yeah, very happy to take part. And if anyone has any questions, obviously, please do get in touch. We have a Scott Wickey team and myself and Dr. Sarah Thomas and we're always happy to collaborate because we want to lessen the barriers to engagement. Brilliant. Thanks again, Ewan, appreciate it. Cheers, Jim. Nom, nom, nom.