By Lorna M. Campbell, University of Edinburgh

Earlier this spring I was honoured to be invited to keynote at three open knowledge conferences in the UK and Ireland, which presented a great opportunity to highlight the work of the Wikimedia community to a wide and diverse audience.

The first event was the OER18 Open for All conference, which took place in Bristol in mid-April.   Wikimedians have had a strong presence at the OER Conference since it was held at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, and this year was no exception.  The conference, which now attracts delegates from across the world, featured no less than eight presentations and lightning talks focusing on different aspects of Wikimedia and education including Wikidata and the Semantic Web (Martin Poulter, WiR Bodleian Library), stories of Student empowerment and using Wikidata in the classroom (Ewan McAndrew, WiR University of Edinburgh), using Wicipedia as a platform to support Welsh language speakers and learners (Jason Evans, National Wikimedian, Wales) and using Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons to support activism in cultural heritage (Anne-Marie Scott, University of Edinburgh).

I’ve been fortunate to attend every one of the OER Conferences since the event began in 2012 and my keynote focused on how the conference has examined and renegotiated what “OER” means over the years, I also looked at what we can do to ensure that open education is diverse, inclusive and participatory, and using examples of innovative initiatives from the University of Edinburgh, including the work of our Wikimedian in Residence, explored how we can engage students in open education practice and the co-creation of open education resources.

The following week I was at a very different event, the FLOSS UK Spring Conference in Edinburgh.  The organising committee were keen to diversify both the scope and the gender balance of their event so I was invited to present a broad overview of the Open Knowledge landscape.  It was also an the opportunity to highlight the problem of structural inequality and systemic bias in open communities, including Wikipedia and GitHub, and to highlight some of the positive steps Wikimedia is taking to tackle this problem, including the Wikimedians in Residence programme, and WikiProject Women in Red, and the success of Welsh language Wicipedia in being the first Wikipedia to achieve gender parity.  I also highlighted the story of Open Knowledge advocate and Wikipedia editor Bassel Khartabil and the Memorial Fund that Creative Commons established to commemorate his legacy, because it demonstrates why it’s so important for all those of us who work in the broad domain of Open Knowledge to come together to break down the barriers that divide us.

In June I was in Galway for the CELT Symposium; not to be confused with the Celtic Knot Conference, which took place in Aberystwyth in July, the CELT Symposium is NUI Galway’s annual learning and teaching conference, and this year the theme was Design for Learning: Teaching and Learning Spaces in Higher Education.  I was able to develop some of the themes I touched on at OER18 and FLOSS UK to look at what we mean when we talk about openness in relation to digital teaching and learning spaces, resources, communities and practices. I also explored the structural inequalities that prevent some groups and individuals from participating in open education and asked how open and equitable our open spaces really are, and who are they open to?  Using innovative examples from our Wikimedian in Residence, I looked at how we can engage with students to co-create more equitable, inclusive and participatory open education spaces, communities and resources.  It’s always a real privilege to be able to talk about our Wikipedia in the Classroom programme and to highlight the work that Ewan McAndrew has done to embed Wikipedia in a wide range of courses across the University of Edinburgh.  Nobody communicates the value of Wikimedia in the classroom better than the students themselves so here’s Senior Honours Biology student Aine Kavanagh talking about her experience of writing a Wikipeda article as part of a classroom assignment in Reproductive Biology.

The title of my CELT talk, The Soul of Liberty – Openness, equality and co-creation, was paraphrased from a quote by Frances Wright, the Scottish feminist and social reformer, who was born in Dundee in 1795, but who rose to prominence in the United States as an abolitionist, a free thinker, and an advocate of women’s equality in education.

“Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.”

The same could also be said of openness; equality is the soul of openness. If our open spaces and communities are not open to all equally, then really we have to question whether they are open at all. We need to identify the barriers that prevent some people from participating in the Wikimedia community, and we need to do what we can to remove these systemic obstructions. To me this is what openness is really about, the removal of systemic barriers and structural inequalities to provide opportunities to enable everyone to participate equitably, and on their own terms. And I believe this is why Wikimedia UK’s outreach activities and the work of our Wikimedians in Residence is so valuable, in helping to improve the coverage and esteem of Wikipedia articles about women and underrepresented minorities, and in redressing the gender imbalance of contributors by encouraging more women to become Wikimedia editors.

Links

OER18 –  The Long View: Changing Perspectives on OER

FLOSS UK Spring Conference – Exploring the Open Knowledge Landscape

CELT Symposium – The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-Creation

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By Lorna M. Campbell, Wikimedia UK Board Member and OER Liaison – Open Scotland at the University of Edinburgh.

Although I’ve worked in open education technology for almost twenty years now, my original background is actually in archaeology.  I studied archaeology at the University of Glasgow in the late 1980s and later worked there as material sciences technician for a number of years. Along the way I worked on some amazing fieldwork projects including excavating Iron Age brochs in Orkney and the Outer Hebrides, Bronze Age wetland sites at Flag Fen, a rare Neolithic settlement at Loch Olabhat in North Uist, the Roman fort of Trimontium at Newstead in the Scottish Borders and prehistoric, Nabatean and Roman sites in the South Hauran desert in Jordan.  I still have a strong interest in both history and archaeology and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m a passionate advocate of opening access to our shared cultural heritage.

Archaeological field work and post excavation analysis generates an enormous volume of data including photographs, plans, notebooks and journals, topographic data, terrain maps, archaeometric data, artefact collections, soil samples, osteoarchaeology data, archaeobotanical data, zooarchaeological data, radio carbon data, etc, etc, etc.  The majority of this data ends up in university, museum and county archives around the country or in specialist archives such as Historic Environment Scotland’s Canmore archive and the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) at the University of York.  And while there is no question that the majority of this data is being carefully curated and archived for posterity, much of it remains largely inaccessible as it is either un-digitised, or released under restrictive or ambiguous licenses.  

This is hardly surprising for older archives which are composed primarily of analogue data.  I worked on the reanalysis of the Cadbury Castle archive in the early 1990’s and can still remember trawling through hundreds of dusty boxes and files of plans, context sheets, finds records, correspondence, notebooks, etc. That reanalysis did result in the publication of an English Heritage monograph which is now freely available from the ADS but, as far as I’m aware, little if any, of the archive has been digitised.  

Digitising the archives of historic excavations may be prohibitively expensive and of debatable value, however much of the data generated by fieldwork now is born digital. Archives such as Canmore and the ADS do an invaluable job of curating this data and making it freely available online for research and educational purposes.  Which is great, but it’s not really open.  Both archives use custom licenses rather than the more widely used Creative Commons licences.  It feels a bit uncharitable to be overly critical of these services because they are at least providing free access to curated archaeological data online.  Other services restrict access to public cultural heritage archives with subscriptions and paywalls.

Several key thinkers in the field of digital humanities have warned of the dangers of enclosing our cultural heritage commons and have stressed the need for digital archives to be open, accessible and reusable.   

The Journal of Open Archaeology Data is one admirable example of an Open Access scholarly journal that makes all its papers and data sets freely and openly available under Creative Commons licenses, while endorsing the Panton Principles and using open, non-proprietary standards for all of its content. Internet Archaeology is another Open Access journal that publishes all its content under Creative Commons Attribution licences.  However it’s still just a drop in the ocean when one considers the vast quantity of archaeological data generated each year.  Archaeological data is an important component of our cultural commons and if even a small portion of this material was deposited into Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikipedia etc., it would help to significantly increase the sum of open knowledge.

Wikimedia UK is already taking positive steps to engage with the Culture sector through a wide range of projects and initiatives such as residencies, editathons, and the Wiki Loves Monuments competition, an annual event that encourages both amateur and professional photographers to capture images of the world’s historic monuments.  By engaging with archaeologists and cultural heritage agencies directly, and encouraging them to contribute to our cultural commons, Wikimedia UK can play a key role in helping to ensure that our digital cultural heritage is freely and openly available to all.

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On Saturday I went along to my first Wikipedia AGM in Birmingham.  It was a really interesting event and it was great to meet so many dedicated Wikimedians and also to see more than a few familiar faces. Martin Poulter has put together a Storify of tweets and pictures from the event here Wikimedia UK AGM 2016.

The event featured an inspiring keynote on The Open Movement by Andy Mabbett who highlighted the importance of linking Wikimedia initiatives to both Open Government and national heritage organisations and who argued that we need to  do more to welcome people to the open community and communicate why openness is important to everyone.

Andy’s talk was followed by a workshop on Wikidata and a walk around the local area to take photographs for Wikimedia Commons.  Who’d have thought a photography safari of Digbeth could be so fascinating? ? I just need to remember to upload some of the pictures I took to the Commons.

In the afternoon we had a fascinating series of lightning talks, one of which covered the brilliant Wiki Loves Monuments photography competition which will take place in the UK again later this year.

Of course the highlight of the day was the UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards.  Martin Poulter was a very worthy winner of the individual UK Wikipedian of the Year award; Navino Evans, one of the developers behind the fabulous Histropedia timeline tool, received an Honourable Mention; and I was delighted that the OER16 Open Culture Conference won Partnership of the Year.

The AGM concluded with the Board meeting and I was honoured to be voted onto the Board as a new Trustee of Wikimedia UK.  The University of Edinburgh already has a strong relationship with Wikimedia UK and I hope that I can make a positive contribution to nurturing the development of a supportive and mutually beneficial relationship between Wikimedia and the education sector.  Gill Hamilton, of the National Library of Scotland stepped down from the Board, so I’ll also be doing my best to fill her shoes as the Scottish representative on the Board, though it’ll be a hard act to follow!

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By Lorna M. Campbell

In April 2016 the University of Edinburgh will host the international Open Educational Resources Conference, OER16, which is coming to Scotland for the first time in its seven-year history. OER16 is being co-chaired by Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Webservices at the University of Edinburgh, and Lorna M. Campbell, Digital Education Manager at EDINA and OER Liaison at LTW. The conference is being supported and organised by The Association for Learning Technology (ALT).

The University of Edinburgh has a long tradition of openness and civic engagement,a world class reputation for encouraging innovation in open education and a forward looking vision for sharing OER.

The theme of the OER16 is Open Culture and the conference will focus on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research. Conference themes include:

• The strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness.
• Converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access.
• Hacking, making and sharing.
• The reputational challenges of open washing.
• Openness and public engagement.
• Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.

One aim of the conference is to start to break down some of the barriers between different open communities; open education, open knowledge, open data, open GLAM, and with this in mind, a diverse range of keynotes and invited speakers has been lined up.

Catherine Cronin, of the National University of Ireland, Galway, will be asking “If ‘open’ is the answer, what is the question?”, and exploring how we can broaden access to education in ways that do not reinforce existing inequalities.

Jim Groom, of Reclaim Hosting, ds106 and edupunk fame, will be asking what would happen if we could imagine technical infrastructure as an open educational resource? How would our conception of OERs expand if we could easily and efficiently create and share applications across institutions?

Melissa Highton, Director of LTW, University of Edinburgh, will discuss the challenges for leadership in open educational resources, the role of universities in open knowledge communities and reflect upon the returns and costs associated with institutional investment.

John Scally, Chief Executive and National Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, will focus on Library’s new strategy; “The way forward: 2015-2020”, which lays out the path to turn the NLS into a digital destination making it’s 24 million items accessible online over the next 10 years. John will outline the range of approaches NLS is taking to opening up access to cultural resources and discuss the challenges for leadership in this area at a national level.

Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Oxford, will reflect on her many years producing OER in her own discipline area, through initiatives such as Great Writers Inspire, and the opportunities it has brought for her colleagues, students and her own research.

The conference will also feature a number of presentations from active Wikimedians.

For further information and to register for OER16 Conference visit the OER16 website and follow the conference tag on twitter #oer16. Early bird registration rates are available until the 6^th of March.

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This post was written by Lorna Campbell and was originally published here. Re-used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License 

Last Friday I went along to the EduWiki Conference in the distractingly beautiful St Leonard’s Hall at the University of Edinburgh. I have to confess to being a bit of a Wikimedia fangirl; I’m not a Wikimedian myself, but I’m a huge fan of Wikimedia’s work in the education domain and I believe Wikimedia has an important role to play, not just in disseminating open educational resources, but also in developing open education practice. This was highlighted by the recent Wikimedia Deutschland OERde14 Conference I went to in Berlin, which brought together over 300* participants from all sectors of German education. This is the first time I’ve managed to get to the EduWiki Conference in the UK and it certainly lived up to expectations. I’m not going to attempt to summarise the entire conference, but I do want to pick out a few highlights

The Conference was opened by Peter McColl, Rector of the University of Edinburgh and editor of the progressive blog Bright Green. McColl highlighted the venerable tradition of the Commons, describing Wikipedia as a perfect example of the Commons, a resource that we come together to create and which we can all share and use.

The morning keynote was presented by Floor Koudijs, Senior Manager of the Wikipedia Education Program who introduced just a few of the 70 education projects Wikimedia funds world wide. These include Wikipedia School (Athens), which teaches Wikipedia writing to adults as part of the Greek Ministry of Education’s Education for Lifetime programme. Several countries also include Wikipedia editing skills as part of their initial teacher training programmes.

Floor’s presentation provoked an interesting discussion about the potential importance of Wikipedia in engaging the public with research and demonstrating academic impact. Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh suggested that citing open access articles in Wikipedia should result in increased evidence of impact while at the same time helping to change attitudes to Wikipedia in in academia. Toni Sant, Wikimedia UK Education Organiser, added that Research Councils UK are starting to show an interest in Wikipedia and that EduWiki was mentioned positively at the 6th international Conference on Integrity and Plagiarism earlier this year.

Marc Haynes, Wikipedian in Residence at Coleg Cymraeg, spoke about Welsh Wicipedia and Porth Esboniadur, a reference resource for Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. Training in wiki skills is provided as an ongoing part of Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol’s academic staffing programme. Marc noted that colleagues are not keen on using CC BY SA licenced content due to the perceived difficulty of mixing it with CC BY content. This is an issue that Cable Green actually addressed on twitter recently, advising that resources that mix licences should state

“Unless otherwise noted, all content in this (content type) is under a CC BY 4.0 license”

Martin Poulter, Jisc’s former Wikimedia Ambassador gave a highly engaging talk about the benefits of “Wikimedia comprehension exercises” to educate colleagues and overcome misconceptions. He then challenged us to locate various tools and useful information, such as quality ratings and translations, around Wikimedia. Even with such a knowledgeable audience, I could hear lots of people commenting, “Ooh! I didn’t know that was there!”

Greg Singh, Lecturer in Communications, Media & Culture at the University of Stirling, also touched on Wikimedia misconceptions, telling us that his students often ask ‘Why doesn’t Wikimedia act more like Amazon?’ – because it’s not a social media platform and it’s not a bookseller!

Cetis’ Brian Kelly and Filip Maljković of Wikimedia Serbia gave a whistlestop tour of Wikimedia projects in the UK and Serbia which I’m not even going to attempt to summarise, but you can find their slides here.

In the afternoon I went along to the “Wiki*edia Projects in Schools” workshop led by Daria Cybulska and featuring thought provoking contributions from John Johnston, Ian Stuart, Ally Crockford and others. Several themes emerged from the workshop including the use of Wikimedia to enhance digital literacy, the possibility of working with Gaelic medium educators to develop Gaelic wikipedia entries for use by teachers and the pros and cons of integrating wikipedia resources with lesson plans. The discussion also drifted into GLAM territory, with several participants mentioning teachers’ fear that they will be caught using licensed content. At this point John Johnston suggested that what we really need is a “wee weans licence” i.e. a licence that allowed children to use content in the course of their education without fear of copyright infringement. John also advised that we shouldn’t be too ambitious when introducing Wikimedia in schools. Don’t dive straight into editing, start off by demonstrating how to use Wikipedia as a source and how to reuse content with appropriate attribution. Iain also suggested that making Wikipedia available in a closed environment, such as a usb stick or a closed network, might encourage its use in schools. Sadly I had to leave before the workshop ended, but I left participants cheerfully discussing how to harness the power of “love and happiness and guilt-tripping” to promote use of Wikimedia in schools

I’ve put together a Storify of my tweets from EduWiki here and Brian Kelly has posted his Storify here

* I’m guessing. I don’t know how many people were actually there but I vaguely remember someone mentioning 300!

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This post was initially published by Lorna Campbell of Cetis and is republished here under its CC-BY licence

“We are all publishers now, publishing has never been so ubiquitous” – Padmini Ray Murray

Earlier this week I was speaking at What I Know Is, an interdisciplinary research symposium on online collaborative knowledge building organised by the University of Stirling’s Division of Communications, Media and Culture, together with Wikimedia UK. It was a completely fascinating and eclectic event that covered everything from new models of academic publishing, issues of trust and authorship, non-hierarchical networks of knowledge, extended cognition, collaborative art and the semantics of open.

Trust was a recurring theme that ran through the event. Symposium chair Greg Singh touched on fundamental issues of digital literacy and trust in his opening talk and Ally Crockford, the National Library of Scotland’s Wikimedian in residence, explored these themes in a talk about tensions and anxieties that persist around Wikipedia and collaborative authoring. Issues of trust persist around Wikipedia partially due to the unfinished nature of many entries, however Ally argued that the evolving nature of Wikipedia is one of its strengths, you can see the history of everything written there. More fundamentally, Ally argued that Wikipedia democratises knowledge and teaches the value of thinking critically. Wikipedia is no longer a resource, it has become a structure for open access knowledge. Ally also picked up on continued anxiety and distrust of open access policies that lingers in academia, and in the humanities in particular, a sentiment that was echoed by many in the room.

Padmini Ray Murray, University of Stirling, picked up on the theme of open access and explored new models of academic publishing including Knowledge Unlatched and the Palgrave Pivot initiative, a novella approach to academic publishing. However she also acknowledged that there is a real danger of an academic divide developing around open access as many authors in developing countries cannot afford article processing charges. Padmini also challenged us all to contribute more to Wikipedia, arguing that it’s our responsibility as digital citizens. Contributing to Wikipedia can challenge the unassailable voice of the academic, and that is no bad thing.

The second session of the symposium focused on extending cognition and agency and we had two proper philosophy presentations from real live philosophers Mike Wheeler and Zoe Drayson. Wheeler introduced the concept of cognitive niche construction; the process of building environmental structures to enable cognition. Humans excel at creating environments that help us to think more effectively and constructively. We embedded cognition by out sourcing tasks outside our thinking brain. Extended cognition suggests that thinking is not bounded by the brain, it is spatially distributed across brain, body and world. Technology can be viewed as an extension of adaptive memory. In the “Google age” the organic brain will now stores the access mechanisms of how to use technology to find information, rather than information itself. Real-time crowd sourcing, as on Twitter or Wikipedia, means that ownership of information is challenged. Mike suggested that one reason people are reluctant to contribute to Wikipedia is that the relation of the information you submit is unstably related to you.

Zoe expanded on the theme of knowledge and its relation to truth and belief.

“Knowledge is true belief (+ something extra) = a combination of what a person believes + true information about the world”

Zoe explored whether wikis challenge the standard account of knowledge because they are collaborative and online, and argued that neither the online nor the collaborative aspect of wikis conflict with the idea that information can constitute knowledge.

The third symposium session explored collaborative community initiatives. Penny Travlou focused on networked communities, creativity and spatiality. She talked about how collaborative art practices have been inspired by the open source computing community and introduced the Furtherfield initiative, a nurturing space where people work in non-hierarchical, network communities.

I spoke about Open Scotland as a collaborative online initiative to raise awareness of the potential benefits of open education practice within Scottish education. I’ve given variations of this presentation several times recently and it’s always interesting to see how aware, or not, people are of open education. In this case only two or three people in an audience of around forty had come across the UKOER Programme and Open Badges, were a similarly alien concept. However, there was a huge amount of interest in the potential of open education and an interesting discussion after my talk about how both academics and students could explore and embed more openness in their own practice.

The day rounded off with a wide-ranging conversation between Toni Sant and Greg Singh. Toni explored the idea of knowledge construction as bricolage, an every day process of putting things together from other things we find lying around. (This rather made me think of the Wombles, but it was getting rather late in the day by that point!) Toni also gave us a lightning tour of the full range of Wikimedia UK activities and introduced their education and outreach programmes. The symposium was drawn to a suitably rousing conclusion with Toni challenging us to

“Be open, collaborative, flexible, global. Don’t be afraid of the future. We can create it together. Be bold…just do it”

Speakers

Lorna Campbell (Cetis/ Open Scotland/ Open Knowledge Foundation)
Dr Zoe Drayson (University of Stirling)
Dr Padmini Ray Murray (University of Stirling)
Dr Toni Sant (University of Hull / Wikimedia UK Academic Liaison)
Dr Greg Singh (University of Stirling, Symposium Chair)
Dr Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh)
Professor Mike Wheeler (University of Stirling)
Dr Ally Crockford (University of Edinburgh / National Library of Scotland Wikimedian in Residence)

Storify

My Cetis’ colleague Brian Kelly has collated a Storify of tweets from the symposium here.

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