1 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:07,000 This Pecha Kucha is an introductory tour of some of the benefits that Wikipedia can bring to your teaching. 2 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:15,000 I'm Clare Thomson and I'm a digital education consultant in the Office for Digital Learning at Ulster University. 3 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:22,000 Together with wider perspectives, I'll integrate some of my own personal experiences of using Wikipedia. 4 00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:30,000 Using it for teaching can be potentially controversial. Many of you listening to this will be sceptical for many reasons. 5 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:34,000 However, I hope you will stick with me for the next six minutes to get an idea of where 6 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:41,000 there are opportunities for both enthusiasts and sceptics for its use in education. 7 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:47,000 Firstly, Wikipedia is only one project under the umbrella of the Wikimedia Foundation. 8 00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:52,000 The foundation provides the essential infrastructure for freely available information. 9 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:59,000 People do not get paid for contributing information, and there are over two hundred thousand volunteer contributors. 10 00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:06,000 However, the majority of these are in one demographic. So this then is one of the ways that students can contribute. 11 00:01:06,000 --> 00:01:13,000 They can bring diversity with gender, language, topics and level of education. 12 00:01:13,000 --> 00:01:23,000 This allows for discussion around power and privilege and access to knowledge in the form of books and journals is afforded to us in higher education. 13 00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:32,000 The advantages for them include developing digital and information, literacy skills, critical analysis, language, deepen their knowledge, 14 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:41,000 of course content and real world experience of communication and feedback with editors, as well as writing for a new audience. 15 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:51,000 There are many different approaches to take. An entry level activity would be to introduce Wikipedia as a class discussion live or in a forum. 16 00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:56,000 How is it perceived? How have teachers referred to it in their classes previously. 17 00:01:56,000 --> 00:02:02,000 You could divide the class into for and against for debate. 18 00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:07,000 Secondly, you could get students to critique an article relevant to their course content. 19 00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:12,000 These could be assigned or self selected. Was it accurate in their view? 20 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:18,000 Were the citations reliable? Was anything missing or even misrepresented? 21 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:23,000 Were images included? And if yes, what did they contribute? 22 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:30,000 Going further, students could actually edit an article, they could do this with or without creating their own account. 23 00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:36,000 They could do some basic proofreading and correcting or reword overly complex sentences 24 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:43,000 or even add citations to improve article credibility using the tool Citation Hunt. 25 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:48,000 Many articles consist of text and would benefit from the addition of images and 26 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:52,000 the most straightforward method for doing this is through Wikimedia Commons. 27 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:57,000 They could choose to search for appropriate images and pick the most applicable. 28 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:06,000 If there are not relevant sources within the Commons or existing resources are outdated students could use their own photographs. 29 00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:15,000 If you're introducing this in September, it would coincide with the International Initiative of Wiki Loves Monuments. 30 00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:19,000 This would bring a competitive element to the activity. 31 00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:27,000 Another way for students to add missing multi-media resources is to create their own diagrams or charts. 32 00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:31,000 This can be done with commonly used packages such as Microsoft 33 00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:42,000 PowerPoint or Google Slides, export diagrams in the format of an image can then be uploaded into Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence. 34 00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:49,000 There are many language versions of Wikipedia which contain fewer articles than the English version. 35 00:03:49,000 --> 00:04:01,000 Students on a language course or students whose first language is not English may choose to translate existing articles from one version to another. 36 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:06,000 However, depending on course outcomes, you may ask the students to create a new article for this. 37 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:12,000 Students do need to have an account and also have made 10 prior edits. 38 00:04:12,000 --> 00:04:20,000 There are several sources of help to identify missing articles such as The Women in Red Project. 39 00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:25,000 My final example is for anyone interested in contributing data sets to the WikiData 40 00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:32,000 project. This example on screen highlights just one case from the University of Edinburgh here, 41 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:36,000 MSc level students in data science for design imported 42 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:40,000 The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database. 43 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:49,000 Students are invariably amazed by how fast their contributions are viewed and also by the speed of change. Very quickly 44 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:58,000 they find their content may be reworded, restructured or even flagged for removal if it's considered too close to the wording of sources. 45 00:04:58,000 --> 00:05:09,000 No plagiarism software can have that impact. Hopefully, this has piqued your interest in using Wikipedia, and I've ordered the approaches from easiest to 46 00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:13,000 difficult. However, there is help there. 47 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:21,000 I began my journey with the University of Edinburgh and used their resources to design my module. 48 00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:29,000 From there, I reached out to the Wikimedia U.K. organisation who sent me useful guides to share with students. 49 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:33,000 They also gave me contact details for Wikimedia Community Ireland, 50 00:05:33,000 --> 00:05:41,000 which opened up the opportunity for Rebecca O'Neill to come and deliver a getting started workshop for students. 51 00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:44,000 They really appreciated the detailed background of Wikipedia, 52 00:05:44,000 --> 00:05:53,000 including all the challenges of maintaining one of the world's largest open, collaboratively curated sources of information. 53 00:05:53,000 --> 00:06:01,000 If you search for the titles of these two resources, you'll find a whole wealth of case studies for more inspiration. 54 00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:08,000 I wanted to end with some numbers of a few of the articles created within the module I did with third year students, 55 00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:12,000 rather than an essay that only myself and one other read, 56 00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:22,000 these articles have been viewed literally thousands of times since either September 2018 or January 2019. 57 00:06:22,000 --> 00:06:26,000 Don't hesitate to contact me with any questions or ideas. 58 00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:40,720 If you would like to explore any of these possibilities, my e-mail is c.thomson@ulster.ac.uk and my Twitter is @slowtech2000.