Expert outreach/Jisc Ambassador/Summary 1 January 2014

This is the fourth report from the Jisc/ Wikimedia UK partnership project, covering 19 November 2013 to the end of the year.

Events delivered

Veterinary Science editathon, London

This WikiVet/Wikipedia event had 14 attendees, including three WMUK volunteers and three WikiVet-related staff. Eight (plus me) were involved in editing Wikipedia and six declared an intention to continue editing Wikipedia in the future. Evaluation forms are summarised at Veterinary_Science_editathon#Evaluation_and_feedback. The general response was that it was a good event, but the size of attendance was disappointing. Although the event was proposed well in advance, the logistics of getting use of the room meant that we had a relatively narrow time window in which to publicise the event. My Royal Veterinary College contact is keen to make this an annual event, and also to collaborate on a paper for a relevant journal.

The event included a tour of the Royal Veterinary College's anatomy museum, and John Cummings took a set of photos which have been uploaded to Commons and included in relevant Wikipedia articles. See commons:Category:Jisc partnership. Thanks John!

Wikimedia for Research Impact and Open Education

The third workshop was hosted by the University of Newcastle. Twenty attended, though two or three came late and missed a substantial chunk. Seventeen evaluation forms were collected, but only six request forms. Evaluation and reflections here.

University of Sheffield have also given me a good quality video recording of November's workshop. I hope to get time to edit the video before the end of the project.

Jisc Innovation Group

This presentation, to an audience of programme managers and programme directors, was a chance to try out some ideas about the value of free content, crowdsourcing and the wiki way of working. It prompted a lot of questions and discussion.

Events arranged

Wellcome Library editathon

The Wellcome Library have agreed to host the third of the project's three editathons: they are a unique resource with a past relationship with Wikimedia UK and a number of successful Jisc-funded projects. Their resources relate to medical humanities and history of medicine as well as to medical science. This event will take place on 26 February.

Jisc Digital Festival

Three event proposals - a workshop on digital literacy, a workshop on Wikipedia university assignments, and a helpdesk - have been sent in for this conference which takes place in March.

Wikimedia for Research Impact and Open Education

• Bath Spa University are hosting the next workshop, in January.
• Bristol University have not set a date yet but are looking to include this in an education innovation seminar series. My contact is also involved in HELF, the Heads of eLearning Forum, which is another potential dissemination channel for case studies.
• Imperial College are keen to fit in a workshop but are unlikely to find a time slot in the scope of the project.
• Jisc Netskills are exploring the possibility of hosting an online version of this workshop.

Publications and outputs

My briefing about content-sharing has gone online on the Jisc Collections blog.

Staff changeovers within Jisc have meant delays in publishing the project's case studies. Peter and I have decided to create a dedicated Jisc blog for the project in early January and to post case studies and other updates to it at least every fortnight for the remainder of the project.

Digital literacy

I interviewed Ruth Page of the University of Leicester (contact made at EduWiki) about her work using Wikipedia to teach digital literacy and creative writing. This will form one of the project's case studies.

Since digital literacy is a main focus of recent Jisc education activity, I've written a briefing about Wikipedia for digital literacy and circulated to some contacts including Simon Knight and Ruth Page for comments. This will also go on the blog.

Open Access publication

I've been corresponding with Daniel Mietchen about the PLoS Computational Biology Topic Pages (creating academic papers on a wiki, publishing them, then copying them to Wikipedia) and he has been extremely helpful for creating a case study.

Finance

Expenses are still well within budget.

This page has been created as part of the 2013-14 partnership between Jisc and Wikimedia UK