 Okay. Great. Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming today. I'm Helene Blumenthal and I am at Wiki Education. I am joined today by three wonderful participants in our Wikipedia student program. Delia Stevenson is assistant professor of African American literature at the University of Florida. Helen Choi is senior lecturer in at the University of Southern California's Returbi School of Engineering. And Heather Sharkey is professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you again to Delia Helen and Heather for joining me. They're going to speak individually about their experiences running Wikipedia assignments. Before I turn it over to them, however, I'm going to give you a very, very quick overview of Wiki Education and the Wikipedia student program. So who is Wiki Education? We're a small nonprofit organization. We're independent of the Wikimedia Foundation. And our mission, broadly speaking, is to connect the worlds of academia and other knowledge-based institutions without a Wikipedia in a nutshell. We try to get subject matter experts and their students, people affiliated with them, to contribute to Wikipedia. We do this chiefly through two different programs, the Wikipedia student program, which is what we'll be talking about today, and our Wikipedia scholars and scientists program. The former is a simple but powerful concept instructors, like the ones you'll hear from today, have their students contribute to Wikipedia as an assignment in their courses. The Wikipedia student program is one wherein we run courses where we train subject matter experts on how to contribute to Wikipedia and to Wikidata. As I said, though, today you're going to hear about the Wikipedia student program. Again, that's where professors, we only work in the US and Canada at institutions of higher education, have their students contribute to Wikipedia as an assignment in their courses. We've worked around since 2010. In that time, we've worked with about 4,800 courses across 800 institutions of higher education in the US and Canada. We've worked with over 100,000 students. In that time, those students have contributed about 80 million words to Wikipedia, across 100,000 articles, and their work is viewed hundreds of millions of times in the course alone and the term alone in which they're doing the work. We know that about 20% of all new editors to Wikipedia are coming from the Wikipedia, from our program from the Wikipedia student program. Essentially, when given the chance students can have an immense impact on open education and open knowledge. So, with that said, you're going to, I'm going to turn this over to Delia. So we can start hearing about these three cases in which students are doing this incredible work. And I'm going to try to stop sharing my screen here. Hold on. Okay. Did that work? Yes. Okay, awesome. Perfect. First of all, thank you, Helene. And thank you, everyone in the audience for participating and being here with us today. My name is Delia Stevenson, as Helene said, I teach African American literature. So I came to the program wanting to do something a little different than just an essay, and wanting to see how I can still help my students with their writing skills, but also give them more digital literacy in that aspect. So what I do is I work mainly with the Wiki African, the African diaspora project, which is a Wikipedia page that basically says, Okay, these are these are the pages that we need to work on to kind of increase this presence. And why I work on this is because a lot of the texts that I teach, whether that be through African American authors like Randall Kenan, or Ann Allen Shockley, J California Cooper, don't have a large Wikipedia presence. So a lot of what we do is my students do is creating new pages or making sure that they are increasing the pages. So for instance, I'm going to share my screen here just to show. Okay, let's see. So I taught this a couple of times now just to give you a background of my courses. I've taught it in a graduate seminar I'm sorry an undergraduate seminar course with only about nine students and that was my first time doing it and I must say that I did not do the best job because I didn't do as much work with Wikipedia as I needed to do to be able to teach it. That being said, it's very straightforward this is what the dashboard looks like. And so, from African American literature course, they it was 35 students with 32 students, and they ended up creating three articles they edited 22 for a total of 783 edits. And a lot of them work together so I would allow students to work together on a page. Basically no more than two people on a page some people chose to work alone, and others work there so as a result of this my students have contributed immensely to certain pages I want to make sure you can still see the tabs. This is of a visitation of spirits which is one of the texts that I teach. As I said this is a novel by Randall Kenan. And what I want to pull out here is that in these, it's not about the quantity that they're putting out is about the quality. So even though some students may have added paragraphs like this happens to be one where they added he he was able to add like several sections. And other people they weren't able to add all of those, you know, to enlarge the page so big, but they had, it was a larger. So, I really like this page because what my students did this is a novel that was that has a lot of characters. And anytime I'm teaching this novel actually we have to go back and forth and say well which one is the second cousin to the third cousin. So what I really want to show is that one of my students took it upon himself. He created this whole diagram it took him like a week and a half. He created this image, he uploaded the image to creative comments, and then he put it on the website I'm sorry on the Wikipedia page. So it is here to be able to help other people that are reading the novel kind of understand the, the characters here. Another thing that my students have done also is this is a page that they've created. Again, a lot of the works that I teach are quite obscure. So we had read in my African American Literature one course, which is for 1945 was a short story by Mary Louise Burgess where, who this page was not created at all. And what one of my students did was they of course, we have library session so they go to the library, and they find the sources that they can find. You'll see the answers here, and she created this page. So it was good to have this presence here because she wasn't there before. Lastly, another page that one of my students created or not created but actually helped to to increase was Rudolph Fisher. And what I was very proud of my students for here was they read all of their texts, all of his texts, and made short summaries of each of his short stories. And this page caught the particular attention of a journalist who was actually writing a story on Rudolph Fisher and he reached out to me to say like wow I saw last year that this page was very bare bones and now there's a lot of meat in it. So he was able to speak with my students and, and, and there were times like this where that my students saw the, the impact of the Wikipedia assignment I like the way that my students were thinking about like, Wow, Dr. If people don't have access to J store, how would they have gotten that the information on Marie Louise Burgess where. And so for them, it's about being able to have information that's behind paywall we talk about that privilege that university, you know, upper education higher education the privilege that they that they hold, and the importance of open access information. So for them, even though they they had a whole new idea about how information is passed. What knowledge looks like and how they get to as one of my students said and this always resonates with me he said you know, I appreciated this assignment because I was able to do something that I feel might outlive me. That is not just an essay that my teacher just sees and then that's it that I'm actually being in conversation with other editors, and it also helped their critical thinking skills about how to write because generally they're always writing argumentative essays in my course. But here, they had to learn how to specifically synthesize information and they said at times that was counterintuitive, but in doing that exercise it allowed them, it still allowed them to understand the larger things that we were teaching in class, but also to give them a way to be engaged with not just the university but the world in that case so this is an assignment that I love. I try to do it every year. My students love it. I use it about eight, eight weeks out of the 16 weeks. I encourage all of you all if you are interested in it is excellent you will be working with Helene who's amazing. So that's I'm going to pass it over in sake of time I want to pass it over to the rest of my wonderful colleagues, and I look forward to question and answer at the end. Thank you. Okay, well thank you so much Delia and and thanks to everyone at the open education conference for having us we're so pleased to be here and I'm going to share my screen here and just see it. Okay, so I just wanted to kind of share my experience with you in terms of how we've been using this Wikipedia assignment and specifically the Wikipedia education dashboard at USC. The course that I teach is really focused on the engineering students. It's a upper division composition course, and they have to take it they have no choice they have to take my class. But I'm, you know, always happy to see them obviously but their upper division students their juniors and seniors, about two thirds are engineering majors and sometimes we get some business students and students from arts and sciences. And for the most part in my class they write about things that they choose so the Wikipedia assignment really helps with that because we work a lot with selecting our assignments and examining them so other assignments are all also somewhat public facing they work they write for magazines they translate science to members of the general public, and part of the learning objectives for my course includes sort of evaluating the quality of references and communicating with different audiences so you can see why the Wikipedia assignment really works well. And I've been doing this assignment for a few semesters now and so I've kind of compiled some of the statistics and you can see here, this is not the actual wiki education dashboard I just did a mock up of it but you can see, when you use it like as deal you showed it's really great for your students because they can see exactly what they've been working on, and exactly their contributions and this is just quantitative obviously but for my engineering students, they really, they really value this type of data. And so you, they are always very impressed by all the work that we help each other achieve by the end of the semester. They, they really focus on quality references quality edits, it's not so much how many words they add but the type of edits that they, that they add sometimes we talk a lot about, you know, can we help organize an article and make very specific headings that can help a reader follow through the narrative of the articles, and also can we organize it in such a way that makes it easy for future editors to come into an article and add information so there's lots of different ways to improve the Wikipedia article and that's one of the things that we discuss in class. And I just wanted to show you some of the examples that students select lots of interest on sustainability. Of course, lots of interest on like cryptocurrency and also non fungible tokens and blockchain. You know, these are engineering students so these are types of things that they like. Also like bubble tea. I am completely fine if they want to choose something outside of engineering as well. And they work on health articles like the cannabis edible article and they learned a lot about how important it is for them to translate the underlying research in a way that is very accurate. And they worked on deep fake and zoom video communications reservoir computing and more technical articles. They worked on the space mirror article which was really challenging for them because there's not a lot of research and they kind of learned like if the research isn't out there or the references aren't out there. You know, they can't write anything. And so that was really important they really, they felt very nervous like oh we're not contributing enough. This is going to affect my grade more practical concerns like that. But this is real life and if the references aren't there they're not going to, you know, have content for that. I'm going to talk about climate dead and textile recycling textile recycling is the article that I've assigned again to see if we can improve that article even further. And I really want my students to understand that you know Wikipedia is not just about writing the perfect article but contributing to a larger effort to compiling this knowledge and they've written about societal issues. Like data science, vertical farming, lots like I said I have lots of business students as well so if they want to work on a more business sided articles they're welcome to do that, and AirPods, and also more ethics related articles as well. Celia said students really really love this assignment, at least the ones that I asked my class, and they really get so much out of it in terms of writing and research and especially collaboration. But one aspect that I really didn't appreciate for quite a while was the digital citizenship outcome. And for me when I asked them in there in our surveys and they. I defined it as the desire to contribute to and ensure the accuracy and accessibility of information. And actually, you know we do a huge engineering ethics unit right before this Wikipedia one. You can see like the digital citizenship on Wikipedia, and these fundamental canons of professional engineering. There's lots of alignment and so by doing the Wikipedia assignment. They can do a lot of thinking about their duties as engineers to the public and how they convey information and how they kind of take it very seriously. It's not just an ethical code that you know they can refer to but it's something that they can sort of make actionable in their everyday work on Wikipedia. I just want to close with this brief quote from one of my students, and I really appreciated her insight and the way she connected the Wikipedia and the ethics assignments and I do think like this is one way that students can really think about, you know how they interact with the world and how they contribute to the world and their positionality in terms of all the wonderful resources they have as college students. With that, I'll turn it over to, do I have to Heather, and thank you very much. Thank you Helen can everybody hear me. It's okay. Great, it's an honor to be here I want to give a shout out to the Wikipedia student program, which has really enriched my life and the lives of my students without the program and the tutorials they offer I don't think I would have dared to venture into writing for Wikipedia and I love doing it. My students are first year to PhD level students at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a private Ivy League institution in Philadelphia so in some ways, not the obvious place for doing open education. We're in small reading and writing intensive seminars of approximately 16 students and my classes relate to Middle Eastern North African and Islamic history. I engage the students with Wikipedia, because I wanted to get them involved in the production of public facing scholarship for local and global communities. And I see this work and the work we do together, because I'm part of it as well as a civic good, which is not to digital citizenship, yes, but also very more with a more focused citizenship in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and the United States and the wider world, and especially relative to the Middle East and North Africa in our case. In terms of pedagogical goals I want students to understand that they can and should produce original research that Wikipedia is an important public forum for sharing knowledge, but that Wikipedia has many gaps, some of which reflect histories of inequity. I want them to find long term meaning and satisfaction what they learn and share, and to realize their potential as lifelong scholars who can and should continue to learn after they finish the class and after they graduate. And above all I want them to to emerge excited and exhilarated from the experience about what they have accomplished and eager to do more. One of the most rewarding way to incorporate Wikipedia and this is after a few semesters of experimentation is to focus on writing new articles in teams and I involved with the students to, and they really love the opportunity to collaborate. So here for our Wikipedia work, we read academic research articles about the politics of Wikipedia, even as we are doing tutorials through the wiki edu site learning the nuts and bolts of writing and editing. And as we're doing research for articles and drafting sections in subgroups. I try to make the students keenly aware of content gaps and their role and potentially filling them. These are articles that relate to the themes of the class or that have some local relevance. I've found it especially valuable to write biographies in teams, but we've also written about culturally significant buildings and landmarks. I divide students into smaller groups and we do this, usually for about, you know, 20 to 30 minutes in each class time we tend to meet in three hour blocks, and we do research and drafting together. We discuss what an article could look like after we do preliminary research we look at sample Wikipedia articles. And at the moment, for example, we're working on two articles. One is going to be about a historic Ottoman era house in northern Iraq, which the Islamic State or ISIS destroyed during its occupation of Mosul between 2014 and 17 and which is now undergoing reconstruction. So the article we're writing is about the history of the house the history of the house during the period of the Islamic States occupation and now the reconstruction. We're also writing an article about an early 20th century Syrian man who was an archaeological foreman on major Mesopotamian digs, including a dig led by T. Lawrence Lawrence of Arabia. So that's what we're working on now. We revise the text carefully we make sure the citations are accurate and so forth, before we post anything. And what are the students get out of it they get a lot of skills which they can carry over to other scholarly genre such as writing research papers they learn about sourcing and citations what kinds of sources Wikipedia uses, but also what we can't use for Wikipedia, such as interviews or oral sources that we might use in other sorts of research and unpublished archival materials. The students learn about metadata in the process of inserting citations. So the literary style and literary registers which is something that deal you mentioned also the style of writing for Wikipedia, formally, but clearly while aiming for neutrality, and we discussed what that can mean. One super important thing that the students get out of Wikipedia that I've never been able to convey as successfully in other ways is the points about copyright Wikipedia has very strict rules, especially about images or at least that's where they come into it. And that's one place where the question of licensing of images comes in. So students have to realize or learn about what protocols they must follow. Because if they don't, they might put something up and then editors at Wikipedia expunge the images quickly so they really learn very effectively how to deal with the images that way. So how does this contribute to open education. Well, I think that the students end up becoming involved in sharing knowledge through the classroom in ways that can last on which others can build, and which others can, of course, access for free, and it's not a disposable assignment it's going to be something that has the potential to last to establish again foundations for for learning on which others can build. They learn they realize every Wikipedia article is a work in progress with with room for expansion and improvement and I also think that awareness of revision is another thing that translates into writing other kinds of research papers. Currently, I hope that it contributes not just to open education, but to continuing education by making participants aware of how they can find lifelong joy in learning. And what I propose to do now instead of sharing my screen I'm just going to post links to four articles that my students and I have written in our classes. All of these are from a class I teach on the history of food in the Islamic Middle East, and you will see that actually the first three articles all of those are images that we took ourselves food that we cooked using historic recipes photographs that we took of a local mosque, and then the other photographs are things that are, you know, open access and that they were able to use so thank you very much. Okay, I am. Thank you all. Thanks everyone. I am going to I want to catch up with the chat here first of all I want to address some of the questions I want to ask the panel some of the questions that came up in the chat and then if anybody else in the audience has anything that they want to verbalize or they would like to put it in the chat, either I think we'll all be here to help moderate the chat, but one of the first things that someone asked was about students perspectives on Wikipedia. How have you all how has doing the assignment has it changed the way that students think about Wikipedia. And how have you seen that. So how, how has it changed the way students regard about just say two things, and then I'm sure you guys have thoughts on this too. I'm astounded by how strict it is how the how strict the rules are, you know that what they have to follow in order to post. So on the one hand they come away really impressed but then in the process of starting to scrutinize Wikipedia more closely. They also realize some of the gaps and flaws. While we were in class last Tuesday, students also found a case of what seems to have been maybe vandalism of a photograph that was replaced while in real time of a member of an Arab. Middle Eastern royal family. So they also realized the potential for things to happen really quickly on Wikipedia. What we need to continue to discussing what I need to continue to discuss with students because they kind of emerge more confused about it afterwards so we have to talk about this is when and it is appropriate to use Wikipedia. Or how it is appropriate to use Wikipedia in research, because I still tend to, I still advise my students not to use Wikipedia, or other encyclopedia articles for research assignments. So Wikipedia is something we use, but we don't necessarily cite in research papers, and the question is to discuss why, and also to discuss varying levels of quality across articles. I'll just jump in for a second. Just generally speaking, because I see a lot of feedback from professors and students in the program. I will say that a common refrain that I hear is that students will say you know my high school teachers said never to use Wikipedia don't trust it. And they generally come away with a new sound respect for what goes into making Wikipedia reliable and accurate. So, you know, they, they, what, what I think just echoing what Heather said is that they really learn how to use Wikipedia with a critical eye. So they, they, you know, they're learning how to understand like when when an article looks, you know, more reliable or accurate than others. And just to follow up on what Heather said, you know, what we hope students come away from this project with is the idea that Wikipedia is the starting point right it's a great place to go for that starting information and to, to, and to find sources and to dig deeper into those sources so we always say we don't we say, write it don't cite it. Yeah, my students use it now they, they, they're like actually Wikipedia should be the first place. Already the first place that you know, but it definitely shouldn't they feel like the ref, I mean the reference section is if you're writing anything, you know the reference section is the great place to be as Heather will say. And so my students really enjoy the fact that now as I like the word that Helene use a new respect for Wikipedia, and then as Heather talked about like how to use Wikipedia like not necessarily perhaps citing it, but using the references there that have been cited right and using that as a jumping off point. And the question that we have in the chat is how you all navigate original research when feeling content gaps. So I love the idea of including images you've taken in an article and I wonder how you think of that in relation to the rule that no original research is allowed so particularly direct analysis of primary sources can sometimes be the best way to feel a gap. It's a tricky one. I mean, for example, this, if I could use, you know, writing about this Syrian archaeologist this early 20th century archaeologist if I could use archival sources there'd be tremendous amount of material about this person. But I have to try to find references in on, you know, in like tea Lawrence's memoirs and other sources and one effect of Wikipedia by the way I think is that it ends up privileging internet sources over archival sources which to me as a historian feels really problematic. In some ways it's easier to say like let's say if we were writing about a particular person from Saudi Arabia, we would have an easier time citing a weekly newspaper from Riyadh, then citing you know like really solid archival source so that's difficult but it ends up being I think fruitful in the context of a classroom and to discuss what are different kinds of sources when can we use them where, and that awareness of creatively using sources is always valuable. I don't see somebody asked about the photographs I what I also see it's a public good to try to upload more images to take images that then people can use of monuments around town and so forth. And so I did not have a photograph I wrote we wrote two biographies of prominent women food scholars, and we didn't have images of them. So what can we use as an image if we can't don't have a photograph of the person. We made one of her, you know 13th century recipes, and we posted our own picture of that and it feels meaningful. So let's go see a photograph some of those I made and I took and some of those my students made and took, but that's because we didn't have pictures of the people to include just to follow up on what Heather just said. By the way Heather I love, I love that you incorporate the media, the images, you know, component into your course. I think it really enriches that. I think the original research thing can be challenging for students because they're used to writing persuasive essays right there used to looking at sources and making you know drawing those conclusions between sources so that's, I think, definitely one of them are challenging aspects of the project. But I think, and it, you know as Heather said I think this really opens up a space for students to explore, you know, why Wikipedia is operating this way. Yeah, I want to go back to an earlier question and actually use that as a springboard to talk more about the challenges of doing the Wikipedia, either from Helene from your side from coaching us, or, you know, from our side as well because one of the questions was, you know, what would I have done differently I think the first time that I taught Wikipedia project I just signed up as you all saw the dashboard, you get to go week by week. And I mean, it's the interface is really easy to use it really tells you go and make an edit, go and sign up for your account. This is how you upload an image, but my mistake was, I thought that I could just do it as the students did it, and I did not prepare beforehand. So that's what my students were really, really good, of course, being on a computer so they just were able to do a lot of it themselves but I wasn't really guiding them, and I didn't use enough class time. It was kind of a background project that we talk about in class, but I didn't really bring it in the class as much. So, then the next semester what I did was I actually signed up through Wiki EDU. They have an Institute for for instructors. And so what I did was it was it was a couple of weeks during the summer, and they teach you how to teach this to your students. And an arm with all of this new knowledge I came back to my larger African American literature course, and I carved out a lot of class time in class for us to troubleshoot okay this is how you all do setting up images. This is how you would go and add a barn star to give somebody a compliment like all of these small things that I was just saying okay the students can do on their own. I was, I was doing it more alongside with them because I was then editing pages myself as opposed to the semester prior where I was just like you all can do it yourselves. So I think that that was my challenge beforehand was not putting enough effort into it myself because I think for this project to be quite successful, you also have to invest the time and so now I make sure that I, you know, once you believe in it your students will believe in it too right and I think that they they they caught on to that as well. So I think I wanted to pivot into if you all can talk about the challenges that you all have with the project and how you all are overcoming those are working with those. Well, I just started the Wikipedia assignment the semester today. So I had a very challenging morning. But, and part of that is, you know, you're dealing with like real life articles that we're trying to improve and every article is different, even if they're similar topics. So, each group or each article kind of needs a different perspective and point of view in terms of how we're going to approach the editing. And that's difficult for students because usually it's just one assignment and it's a little bit more everyone is starting off from the same point. And it's easier for me to as the instructor, but you know real life is complicated and, you know, sometimes we'll pick an article and the next day someone will have made massive edits to it and now the students are thinking. Now what am I going to do that sort of thing, but you know and and when I first started teaching this assignment, I really feared that sort of thing so I would really pick the assignments that like one view a day or something because I didn't want to have to deal with that but I because I've become a little bit more familiar with the assignment. We are kind of communicating a little bit more with outside editors and dealing with the real life issues that come with collaboration on this type of scale. And I think because of that, it's a much more fun assignment you just never know what's going to happen, but it's much more kind of real in a way it's not such a controlled atmosphere. It's not going to be perfect every time and I think at least for my students that sense of ambiguity and unpredictability is important to kind of sit with. And they're really used to sort of engineering answer sometimes and there they are very uncomfortable with it but and I am too, because I worry every day about it, but it makes it fun and it makes it much more tangible in terms of I'm going to have to deal with the real life thing. This article and how what my role is with it and so they really have to walk around like lots of elements of that article it's not just the article it's that talk page history of it, and, you know, sort of the interactions that they have with other and outside editors so that's really challenging for me, but also a really engaging part of the learning experience at least for me anyway I always learn a lot from this time every semester. I see we have two minutes left, and I want to make sure we get to this last question about the balancing between using class time and doing assignments such as open pedagogy here I like. I'm trying to get back to where it was. Okay, so it's just going to take a lot of time and extra work to do these type of assignments, and it's hard to overcome that by presenting the value of open pedagogy assignments so what what tips do you all know about the value of these assignments and its space in the classroom. I have two quick tips. One is it helps to identify before the semester starts in my case which article we're going to work on so that we have a viable candidate article and we're not struggling to find that. Another thing is it's essential that I'm involved with the students when we do these teams this teamwork. If we make it a team assignment and we're all grappling and struggling together and debating what to do here and there at first of all makes it a more exciting collective learning experience but then one is also aware of what's going on and the challenges students are facing, because I don't think it's the kind of thing you can have the students do and you leave them to it. And oh yeah, did you do your Wikipedia work. They're not going to be able to do that because a lot of what the writing for Wikipedia entails is grappling with ambiguities and like you guys have been saying and the sources and how do we cite this and can we cite this and is this wording appropriate, especially on delicate topics and topics that can be sensitive, as many are in Middle Eastern North African and Islamic studies. We'd like to thank everyone for coming today we're going to need to end this recording is there any final statements from our presenters or well wishes. I just want to thank everybody for being here like I said the energy here is, is wonderful. I love being in this space with you all so thank you. Likewise thank you to everyone and especially thank you to Julia have her and Helen for your continued amazing work. Thanks everybody everyone. Bye bye.