This PressED Conference talk by @lornacampbell and @emcandre explored how @EdinburghUni’s Wikimedian in Residence and Academic Blogging Service have used WordPress SPLOTs to develop sustainable open licensed digital skills development resources on engaging with @Wikipedia and blogging to build your professional profile.
Tag Archives: OpenEdFeed
PressED Conference 2019 – Better late than never!
This post is now six weeks overdue but I’m adding it here for the sake of completeness if nothing else! The second PressED Conference, run by the apparently inexhaustible Pat Lockley and Natalie Lafferty, happened way back in April and it was just as fun and inspiring as last year’s event. The range of presentations was really eclectic and thought provoking and I particularly enjoyed Lorna Jane Richardson’s keynote on the Public Archaeology Twitter Conference, which was the original inspiration for PressED, and Kevin Gannon’s keynote on Letting Students Own Their Learning. I also learned some Not So Stupid WordPress Tricks from Alan Levine 🙂
This year I was involved in two presentations one, with Ewan McAndrew, on our use of SPLOTS to support digital skills, and one with Frances Bell, Maren Deepwell and Sheila MacNeil reflecting on our experience of facilitating the #femedtech Open Space for OER19. I’ve posted both presentations in separate blog posts here:
Weirdly, I still find twitter presentations far more nerve-wracking than speaking in public, I’m not sure why because I’ve used twitter routinely for almost ten years, and it’s a medium I’m usually really comfortable with. Maybe it’s some kind of odd performance anxiety :} Here’s a Top Tip I wrote for newcomers to the conference to help with those nerves. 
Blogging about Blogging
I’ve been rather neglecting this blog recently, ironically because I’ve been busy blogging about blogging on other blogs :} The University of Edinburgh launched a new Academic Blogging Service, including a centrally supported WordPress platform, blogs.ed.ac.uk, last year and the service has really taken off.
In addition to our workshop Blogging to Build your Professional Profile, as part of the roll out of the service, Karen Howie (Digital Learning Applications & Media) and I have been curating a Mini-Series on Academic Blogging over on the Teaching Matters blog. The series features reflections on different uses of academic blogs from staff and students across the university. Together with Susan Greig (Digital Skills) and Daphne Loads (Institute of Academic Development), I wrote a post on blogging for professional accreditation Blogging: What is it good for? The post reflects on my experience of using my blog to create and evidence my CMALT portfolio, while Susan and Daphne discuss how blogging can be used to support CMALT and HEA accreditation. 
We’ve also recorded two podcasts as part of the series; one on How Blogging can be used as an effective form of assessment, and another on Blogging to enhance professional practice, which is a conversation between Karen Howie, Eli Appleby-Donald (Edinburgh College of Art), James Lamb (Centre for Research in Digital Education) and I. Though I’ve recorded lots of webinars, this is the first time I’ve recorded a conversational podcast and it was a really fun experience! Karen made a great “interviewer” and, perhaps surprisingly, Eli, James and I managed not to talk over each other all the time. Although all of us have quite a difference experience of and approach to blogging we were all very much in agreement that blogging can be a great way to enhance professional and academic practice.
The week before last I had double blogging; on Wednesday afternoon I gave a talk as part of a panel on “Using Social Media to Engage Research End Users” for colleagues in the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences.
Thank you @EdinburghUni for today's Learning Lunch. All about using social media to engage research end users. Brought to us by an all female panel currently rocking social media. Thank you Clare de Mowbry, Jen Ross @LucyHunterB @LornaMCampbell #womeninacademia pic.twitter.com/kdxAGW07DC
— Marissa Millar (@Marissa_Millar) May 8, 2019
Then later in the evening I joined Girl Geek Scotland to give a talk on professional blogging (slides) as part of and event on “Your Online Self: How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?” Girl Geek Scotland are a network and community for those working and studying in creativity, computing, enterprise, and related sectors in Scotland. As most of the participants are working and building careers in the commercial sector it was quite a different audience to the kind I usually experience and it was really interesting for me to reflect on the affordances and tensions between using blogging and social media to develop your personal profile and to market a personal brand. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the whole event so I missed the discussion sessions later in the evening but Anne-Marie said that there was considerable interest in using blogs for personal development, so I’ll take that as a win. Now all I need to do, is get my own blog back in order!
Thank you to @girlgeekscot, @iZettle and speakers @LornaMCampbell, @ShannonMcEnroy, @SoozYoung for an extremely interesting and informative event tonight about how to present yourself online. Im inspired to knock the dust off this twitter account and tweet again! #womenintech pic.twitter.com/qWqzkdJpw7
— Katharina Bitzan (@katharinabitzan) May 8, 2019
Opening Online Learning with OER
This is the transcript of a talk I gave last week at the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine’s Post Graduate Tutors Away Day at the University of Edinburgh. Slides are available here: Opening Online Learning with OER.
Before I go on to talk about open education and OER, I want you to think about Ra’ana Hussein’s inspiring video where she articulates so clearly why participating in the MSc in Paediatric Emergency Medicine has been so empowering for her.
Ra’ana said that the course helps her to be better at her work, and that she gains knowledge and learning that she can implement practically. It’s enabled her to meet people from diverse backgrounds, and connect with a global community of peers that she can share her practice with. She finds online learning convenient, and tailored to her needs and she benefits from having immediate access to support, which helps her to balance her work and study commitments.
I’d like you to try and hold Ra’ana’s words in your mind while we go on and take a look at open education, OER and what it’s got to do with why we’re here today.
OER19 – Stories of Hope
It always takes me a while to write my post OER Conference reflection because I invariably come back brimming with so many thoughts, ideas, emotions and new perspectives that it’s hard to know where to start. When Catherine Cronin introduced the themes of OER19 Recentering Open: Critical and Global Perspectives at the end of OER18 in Bristol she stressed the imperative of moving beyond hero narratives and including marginalised voices, and the conference certainly met that challenge. Rarely have I had the privilege to be part of such a diverse, inclusive, respectful and supportive community. It was a humbling and empowering experience.
Hope, Labour and Care
If I was to pick one overarching theme from the conference it would be hope. Kate Bowles set the tone of the conference with her profoundly moving and thoughtful opening keynote A quilt of stars: time, work and open pedagogy. Along the way, Kate acknowledged and paid her respects to those who have shaped and supported her learning journey, from the traditional owners of the land on which she works, the Wadi Wadi Nation, though pioneering Irish astronomers, American solar quilters, friends and colleagues. And Kate also gave us a moment of silence to re-member those who had helped us on our own open journeys and who were not able to be with us in Galway.
Feeling the love ❤️ many thanks! Please do let everyone know I’m not really ill or anything, just working for Government 😀
— Josie Fraser (@josiefraser) April 10, 2019
Kate spoke about the importance of our labour of care, and how we absorb that labour into our own open practice, but she also highlighted the risk that without a system wide ethic of care, open practice becomes another caring labour. And we know that such labour usually falls to women and those who lack power and privilege. (This is a something that is very close to my own heart and the heart of the femedtech network.) But it was Kate’s closing note that really resonated with me throughout the conference. Quoting Henry Giroux “Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of our times” Kate reminded us that although hope must be realistic about the environment we work in, change is possible, and that
“Hope is not a pipe dream, it is the most important resource we have. It is the heartbeat of our politics.”
.@KateMfD’s #OER19 keynote pic.twitter.com/31XwxhUF7U
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) April 10, 2019
Hope was also the theme of the closing address of the conference, with co-chairs Catherine and Laura separately and independently both choosing the same quote from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope In The Dark
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
The overarching theme of #OER19 pic.twitter.com/vs12jS4yAt
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) April 11, 2019
Telling Tales
It seems fitting somehow that Galway was a place to tell stories. Kate began by quoting Jerome Bruner in her keynote “any story one may tell about anything, is better understood by considering other ways in which it can be told.” I heard many stories told in many different voices. Su-Ming Khoo told the Haida story of The Raven and the First Men and the opening of the world. Johanna Funk shared her story of Learning on Country in the coastal homelands of Galiwin’ku with Dr Kathy Guthadjaka. Lori Hargreave told her own deeply personal Tale of Resilience. When the audio technology failed us, Frances Bell stepped in and gave voice to Suzan Koseoglu’s moving found poem reflecting the voices of Turkish womens’ stories of open and distance learning, which led to a powerful conversation about women’s anger when they are denied the right to education. (Huge appreciation to Tom Farrelly for chairing a technically challenged session with such sensitivity, ensuring that all these women got to tell their stories.) But perhaps the story that spoke to my own heart was Sara Thomas’ Once Upon an Open, a story about rescuing two Scottish women, Marie Lamont and Lady Catherine Bruce of Clackmannan, from the forest of history, a story of orcs, and trolls and damn rebel bitches, a story of who gets to tell stories.
Values and Pictures
We were also telling stories in our University of Edinburgh workshop, Positioning the values and practices of open education at the core of University business, when Stuart Nicol, Anne-Marie Scott and I challenged participants to share stories of how openness could be centred and have impact in their institutions. To provide inspiration we shared some of the amazing open licensed images curated by the University’s Centre for Research Collections and the results were as inspiring as they were creative. We filmed the stories people told and as soon as we’ve got them online, we’ll share them on Open.Ed.
Decolonisation
Decolonisation, dispossession and the need to foreground indigenous knowledge were other themes that ran throughout the conference. In her challenging and thought provoking keynote, Openings – Bounded (in) equities; entangled lives, Su-Ming Khoo noted that while we would like to think of Higher Education as a zone of freedom, that freedom is bound up in our entanglements with power, capitalism, and the colonial present. She challenged us to unmask the colonial wound and use these open wounds to be the place where healing and suturing can take place, reminding us that there is honour and value in the art of repair, kintsugi.
“We need to address the psychological and emotional legacy of colonialism and the needs of both the oppressor and oppressed in order to overcome and transform.”
Su-Ming’s keynote made me think of my own people and their history of being both oppressed and oppressor; the Gaels who were cleared from their homelands to the ‘New World’ only to re-enact their own dispossession on the people they found there.
femedtech
femedtech had a powerful presence at the conference. Sharon Flynn gave a huge shoutout to the importance of the community in her welcoming address and we were overwhelmed by the positive response to the femedtech Open Space, femedtech.net, both in terms of the writing that’s been shared and the people who came to our open space session, where it was standing room only.
We are many #femedtech #oer19 pic.twitter.com/ecnuv9OwI1
— Dr Maren Deepwell (@MarenDeepwell) April 10, 2019
In their presentation on the open distributed network and shared curation model that is @femedtech on twitter, Frances Bell, Louise Drumm and Lou Mycroft explained that femedtech’s resources are passion, kindness, enthusiasm and volunteer time, all of which were present at OER19 in abundance. If any one image sums up the femedtech community, it’s this:
#oer19 @LouMycroft joining us with the help of @louisedrumm #femedtech pic.twitter.com/yPyOvarPPo
— Tom Farrelly (@TomFarrelly) April 10, 2019
It is such an honour and a privilege to be part of this amazing community.
Regrets
If I have one regret from the conference, it’s that because I took part in so many sessions and was also on chairing duties, I missed dozens of talks that I really wanted to hear. I had to duck out of Taskeen Adam, Caroline Khun and Judith Pete’s open praxis keynote panel so I’m immensely grateful for the recording of this and other sessions provided by ALT and OER’s amazing media team of Martin Hawksey and Harry Lamb. Huge thanks to Martin and Harry for making sure these critical and necessary voices can be heard by all.
That Guy(TM)
There’s one last point I want to reflect on before I round off this post…Not once over the course of the four days I spent in Galway, did I find myself stuck listening to That Guy(TM). You know the one, I’m sure you’ve met him at many conferences, the guy (though they’re not always guys) who hogs the conversation and is tone deaf to the voices of those who lack his privilege. I heard many, many diverse voices at OER19, but not once did I hear That Guy(TM). So I’d like to thank Catherine, Laura, Maren, Martin and everyone who made OER19 such an empowering and inclusive conference, and ensuring that marginalised voices were listened to and heard. It fills me with hope.
Open Practice and Invisible Labour
This piece was originally posted on femedtech.net.
Something has been niggling at me for ages now. Something about digital labour and open education. I’ve been struggling to figure out how to frame this and what I’m trying to say, but Martin Weller’s thoughtful blog post on gatherer calories and invisible artefacts and Frances Bell’s subsequent comment gave me a starting point.
On the blogging calories front, there have been 6 guest OER19 posts so far, with 11 authors, all women
Catherine Cronin has eloquently reminded us that openness is a continually negotiated space, a constantly negotiated practice. We all experience openness differently, from different perspectives and different positions of privilege and discrimination. For some of us, open education is part of our job, for some it’s our research, our field of study, for some it’s a philosophy, an ethos, a personal commitment, for some it’s political. For many it’s all of the above.
I am privileged to be able to work in the area of open education and I also regard myself as an open education practitioner. My open practice is expressed in different ways; I read, I write, I comment, I blog, I participate in the femedtech network, I contribute to Wikipedia. It’s a practice that extends far beyond the bounds of my job and I have no complaint with that, quite the opposite in fact, I appreciate this blurring of my institutional role with my personal commitment to openness. That’s part of my privileged experience of openness. However the blurring of these boundaries also raises issues of digital labour.
We all have a deep personal commitment to our practice, to equity and openness, we all want to be good citizens of the open community, making a positive contribution to the commons, but when do the hours that we willingly devote to open education start to become unacknowledged, invisible digital labour? And as both Frances and Martin have pointed out, so often those that go the extra mile are those who are marginalised in some way, women, people of colour, early career researchers, those employed on precarious contracts. At what point does personal commitment become unwitting exploitation of labour?
These are problems that exist right across academia of course and open education is far from immune. How much does the open community rely on invisible digital labour? How far does it exclude those who are unable or unwilling to contribute their labour for free? And how do we mitigate this?
This thread from @HEreflections1 caught my attention on twitter last week:
One of the most pernicious aspects of stress, anxiety and burnout in education is that it often starts with individuals who work longer hours through enjoyment and an ethic of care. But at some point the organisation captures this as core work which has to be done.
As a result the enjoyment, the agency is lost and the stress begins to grow, leading eventually to hate and/or exhaustion in some cases. And it creeps up on people so that they blame themselves. This is the failure of the system, and any discussion of well-being or
expert groups focusing on happiness misses the point completely. What starts with dignity and vocation is smashed by performativity, by human as resource, and by an inability to see education as a community.
The point that particularly struck me was this:
What starts with dignity and vocation is smashed by performativity
And this was echoed by Laura Czerniewicz during this week’s OER19 preview webinar when she cautioned that
“Good intentions can undermine themselves with unintended consequences.”
When so much of our open practice is mediated through social networks there is sometimes a pressure to always be “on”, to always be commenting and contributing, to always to be seen to be doing. And it was this that prompted me to ask this question in our femedtech OER19 Open Space
If there a performative aspect to openness, what does it achieve and how?
I don’t have an answer to this question, and I’m not even sure I know where I’m going with this yet, but I do think we do need to be able to balance our agency as open practitioners and citizens of the global open education community with cognisance that it is our digital labour that sustains that community at both the personal and institutional level.
uCreate Studio – Amazing successes and interesting fails
Yesterday Charlie and I paid a visit to uCreate Studio, the University of Edinburgh’s community maker space, to talk about how the OER Service can help to promote some of the amazing creative outputs being produced by the staff and students using the studio. The team at uCreate, led by Mike Boyd, offer equipment, advice, training, and support to help you make (almost) anything. Based in the main Library, the studio provides free access to a wide range of tools and equipment including 3D printing and scanning, die cutting, vacuum forming, CNC milling and much more. Some of the models and projects being created by staff and students using the studio are already being shared in online maker community repositories such as Thingiverse and Sketchfab and we hope we’ll be able to work with Mike and his team to share some of these creative outputs through the OER Service. It was great to see all the amazing things going on in the studio, I particularly liked the Showcase of Amazing Successes and Interesting Fails and I would love to have a go of the CNC mill :}
You can find out more about uCreate Studio here and and book an induction and equipment here.
Inspiring students, pioneering women and virtual dragons
February and March are always busy months for Open Education and this year was no exception, with the University’s Festival of Creative Learning, Open Education Week and International Women’s Day all coming back to back.
Niko is unimpressed…, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
The fun and games kicked off with Festival of Creative Learning in mid February. My OER Service colleague Charlie ran a really fun and thought provoking 23 Things for Digital Confidence workshop. The workshop challenged us to explore how we engage with technology in creative ways and we also got to play with some really cool augmented reality toys. Oh, and there were dragons! I took them home but I don’t think my cat was very impressed :}
Later in the week I helped to run a Get Blogging! workshop with Karen, Lila and Mark from DLAM, which guided students through the process of setting up a blog on Reclaim Hosting and provided them with some pointers on the benefits of blogging and topics they could write about. I don’t usually get to work directly with undergraduate students so it was a really rewarding experience. Their enthusiasm was infectious and it was great to see how proud and excited they were to leave at the end of the day with their very own brand new blog. The fabulous feedback the students left was just the icing on the cake. My slides from the day are here: Why Blog?
At the beginning of March we celebrated Open Education Week, I’ve already written a post about the activities we planned over the course of the week, and they all went really well. We curated eight blog posts from staff, students and graduates on the Open.Ed blog over the course of the week, each bringing a unique perspective on engaging with open education. You can read a round-up of of these posts here. I particularly like this quote from Martin Tasker, our very first Open Content Curation Intern, who is now building a career as a software engineer.
“In an age where where the world is both more connected and less trusting than ever, the onus is on institutions such as universities to use their reputations and resources to promote open education. As well as benefiting the public, it benefits the institutions themselves – there’s little better in the way of marketing than having potential applicants having already experienced some learning at your institution.”
I’ve often quoted Martin’s Open Content Curation blog posts when I talk, and I’m sure I’ll be quoting his Open Education Week blog post, Reflecting on the Importance of Open Education, too.
My daughter’s contribution to International Women’s Day, CC BY SA, RJ McCartney
International Women’s Day fell at the end of Open Education Week and Information Services marked the event by hosting a Women of Edinburgh Wikipedia Editathon and naming the Board Room in Argyle House after Brenda Moon, the first woman to head up a research university library in the 1980s, and who played a major role in bringing the University into the digital age. I spent part of the day updating the Wikipedia entry I’d previously written about Mary Susan McIntosh to include information about her work as a Women’s Rights Advocate campaigning for legal and financial rights for married and co-habiting women, defending the right to sexual expression, and arguing against censorship of pornography.
The following week I was off down to UCL for their Open Education Symposium. It was a privilege to be invited to share the University of Edinburgh’s strategic approach to Open Education, and it was great to hear about some of ways that openness is supported across UCL. I particularly enjoyed hearing a group of Arts and Sciences BASc students reflecting on their positive experience of engaging with Wikibooks. Their comments reflected those of our Edinburgh student who have participated in Wikipedia assignments and editathons.
Somehow, in amongst all that, there was also several ALTC submissions, the launch of femedtech.net, and my daughter’s 13th birthday. How the hell did that happen?!
Have No Fear – Learning to love your blog
Last week I taught the third run of our Blogging to Build your Professional Profile workshop and also had the pleasure of joining a lunchtime call with colleagues from ALT to talk about different approaches to team blogging. Something that struck me is that whenever I talk about blogging there are a number of issues that come up repeatedly, regardless of whether the people I’m talking to are experienced bloggers or whether they’re dipping their toe in the water for the first time. And all these issues relate broadly to anxiety.
All is vanity
Even among experienced bloggers there can be a lingering feeling that blogs are really just a bit of a vanity project, a space to show off and blow your own trumpet, and well, it’s all just a little bit undignified really. I find this a bit odd because as academics and professionals we are already expected to disseminate our work broadly, through scholarly publications, professional papers, and academic and industry conferences. I think the difference with blogs is that they exist outwith the traditional academic sphere of acceptance and control. By and large, we control our own blogs; we control what we post, when we post, and who we choose to share with. I’d argue that far from being a vanity project, blogs are an invaluable way to facilitate reflective practice, and to empower colleagues to curate their own professional and academic portfolios and identities. If you need to be convinced about the benefits of academic blogging have a look at some of the great blogs that are linked on our Academic Blogging SPLOT and hosted on the University of Edinburgh’s new blogs.ed.ac.uk service.
Have no fear
Once you get used to blogging it’s easy to forget just how terrifying it can be to hit that little blue Publish button if you’re not used to putting your words out there. This is particularly true if you’re writing blog posts that are in any way personal or reflective. Even experienced academic and professional writers can suffer from this kind of anxiety. When we write academic papers or professional reports we generally abide by certain writing standards and conventions, which arguably place a degree of distance between ourselves and our words. When we write personal reflective posts, the buffer provided by these conventions disappears. Sharing a part of ourselves online can be a lot scarier than sharing our papers and reports. I’ve blogged for years but I still feel a little anxious when I publish something that’s a bit more personal, a bit more political, a bit closer to the bone than usual. In my experience it’s really worth it though, the response I’ve had on the odd occasions I have published more personal posts has been incredibly supportive and up-lifting. Few pieces of writing have terrified me more than Shouting From The Heart, but the response to that piece from colleagues was overwhelming.
Perfection is the enemy of the good
Another issue that often comes up is what if my blog posts aren’t good enough? What if my ideas aren’t fully formed? What if I post something embarrassingly bad? What if I regret it later? Perfectionism is one of the main stumbling blogs that often prevents people from taking up blogging, particularly in a domain like academia where imposter syndrome is rife. When we all set such ridiculously high standards for ourselves, it can be really difficult to put anything out there that is less than perfect, and the result of course is that we end up posting nothing. However the real beauty of blogs is that they are ideally suited to letting you develop your ideas and think aloud. Blog posts don’t have to be perfect, they don’t have to be fully formed, and if there are one or two typos, well, it’s really not the end of the world, you can always go back and edit later. Some of my favourite blogs are ones where I can see colleagues thinking through their ideas. Maren Deepwell, Melissa Highton, Sheila MacNeill, Anne-Marie Scott and Martin Weller’s blogs are all great examples of this. My advice if you’re struggling with perfectionism is to start out by blogging in private. Lots of bloggers keep both public and private blogs and that’s just fine. Blogging, like any form of writing, is 90% practice and hopefully as your confidence in your writing grows, you’ll find it’ll be easier to start sharing your posts in public.
Shouting into the void
So that happens once you’ve written your first blog post, taken a deep breath, hit the little blue button, and sent it off into the big world wide web? Quite often what happens is…nothing. Nada. Crickets. Tumbleweed. New bloggers are often anxious about getting lots of negative comments on their posts, but to be honest, it’s far more common to get no comments at all. Seriously, have a look at my blog, the vast majority of posts don’t have a single comment. That doesn’t mean that no one is engaging with them though, whenever I write a blog post, I post a link on twitter and that’s where the conversation happens, if it’s going to happen at all, because that’s where my community of open education practitioners is. Many of my posts still pass under the radar though, and there’s no denying that it can be discouraging to post a lovingly crafted piece of writing, particularly one you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into, and it receives no engagement at all. This can be heightened by the odd sense of loss all writers sometimes feel when they let go of a piece of writing.
One way to address this is to be strategic about how and when you post. There’s a lot of advice and guidance available online that will tell you when the optimal time to post is and how to use analytics to track the impact of your writing, however I’d caution against getting too caught up in tracking clicks and likes and comments. Online engagement can be fickle and it’s often hard to predict which posts will get lots of attention and which will sink without a trace. Don’t judge the value of your writing on the basis of social media likes; posts that get a lot of attention aren’t necessarily the “best” posts, and vice versa.
My approach to counteracting post-publication (post-posting?) blues is to try and write for myself first and foremost. That might sound trite, but it’s still good advice. I’m a great believer in the benefits of writing as a personal reflective practice. If other people engage with what I write, that’s a bonus, but if not, it doesn’t matter, because I’ve still benefited from the process of writing.
Don’t feel too dispirited if you don’t get much engagement on your blog, try to enjoy the process of thinking and writing for yourself. But if you do want feedback and engagement, don’t be afraid to reach out; find out where your people are, share your posts with them there, ask colleagues for comments and input, most will be only too happy to oblige.
Maren wrote a brilliant post on the creative process of blogging after our talk last week and I can highly recommend it if you’re looking for inspiration: Blogging is my sketchbook: reflecting on the creative process and open practice.
Happy Birthday Wikipedia!
Wikipedia turns 18 today! Hurray! I hope it doesn’t go out and get completely hammered and wake up in the morning with no memory of how it got home. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Wikimedia UK has asked us all to tell them why we value Wikipedia.
- What does Wikipedia mean to you?
The power of open knowledge at your fingertips!
- Why do you think people should value Wikipedia?
Used correctly, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of open knowledge. It’s one of the few truly open and transparent sources of knowledge and information on the web. Its very existence is a testament to human ingenuity and perseverance, and a challenge to those who seek to manipulate and restrict access to knowledge and information.
Also it’s dead handy when you need to know the population of villages in Fife.
- What would you say to someone to encourage them to become a Wikipedia editor?
Wikipedia is an amazing achievement but we still have so much work to do. The encyclopaedia is a reflection of the world and the people who edit it and as such it mirrors all our inequalities, prejudices and power structures. If we want Wikipedia to be more diverse, more inclusive and more representative, then we need to encourage more people, and specifically more women and minorities, to edit. Now more so than ever, open knowledge is far too important to be left in the hands of the few.
Ewan McAndrew, our fabulous Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, often reminds us that the number of Very Active editors (i.e. more than 100 contributions in a given month) on English Wikipedia is just over 3,000, which is roughly equivalent to the population of a small village in Fife. Anstruther for example. Imagine the sum of all knowledge being left in the hands of Fifers?! Perish the thought! You know what you have to do….Edit!
Anstruther from Kirkyard, CC0, Poliphilo, Wikimedia Commons
Disclaimer: I’m sure Anstruther is lovely.
