My #100CommonsDays Challenge

Regular readers of this blog will know that I strongly support the use of Wikipedia (and Wikimedia generally) in teaching, and that I'm a member of Wikimedia Community Ireland. I'm still very nervous about editing, and until recently have only made very minor contributions to the online encyclopedia. It's one of my own development goals.

I am completely in awe of anybody who takes on the #100wikidays challenge - to write an article a day for 100 consecutive days. I first heard of this through our community member Rebecca O'Neill, who completed the challenge in 2015. Mourning my mother through a hundred days of Wikipedia editing is another, more recent, account of the challenge. Given that I've only written one article from scratch, I'm a long way from even contemplating the challenge.

However, earlier this year I saw that Rebecca had started the #100CommonsDays challenge - to upload an image to Wikimedia Commons every day for 100 days. I thought that sounded very much more manageable. I have contributed a small number of images before, mostly of the University, and have also been using the Commons as a gateway strategy for introducing academics to the notion of contributing content to Wikipedia.

And so, on 27th January I uploaded my first image of the challenge - an image of the diving board at Blackrock in Salthill, Galway.

Over the next 100 days, I added a new image every day. My final image of the challenge was uploaded on 6th May. They are mostly of buildings, or plaques, or statues, or places. They are all my own work, and are shared under the default Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This means that anybody is free to share or remix the images, but I (as the author) have to be attributed, and any use of the images must be shared under a similar license.

So, the images can be used to illustrate any of the articles on Wikipedia (in English or any other languages). But they can also be used for other purposes - making Wikimedia Commons a very useful resource for finding images for teaching purposes.

What did I learn from completing the #100CommonsDays challenge?

I had to be organised. While I like to take photos, not all of them are suitable for the Commons. I created a dropbox folder into which I dumped photos that might be useful. Each day, then, I had a source of images that could be uploaded.

Sharing helps. From day 1 I started to share my uploaded images with my friends and family on Facebook. This meant that if I missed a day, somebody would know! It helped to keep me on track, and also elicited some questions from friends about the Commons. So - another teaching opportunity!

I had to do my research. There's no point uploading an image if I can't remember exactly what it is of! Sometimes, I had taken a photo of a monument, but couldn't remember what monument it was. I just had a vague recollection of where I had been. Sometimes google maps was quite useful to do some detective work.

Categories matter. I quickly found out that the category structure is how files are organised and found on the Commons. Every file (image) should be associated with a category. Categories form hierarchies, and a file should be associated with the most specific category in the hierarchy. It will then also be associated with all parent categories. It took a number of edits of the categories of my files (mostly by bots) for me to figure this out!

Look for gaps. There's no point in adding yet another photo of the Empire State Building - somebody, with a better camera, has been there before me. Instead I had to do a little investigation before adding an image, to make sure the subject wasn't already well covered.

You can't upload just anything. I was careful to only contribute images that I had taken myself, and that meet copyright requirements, and that are suitable for the Commons (i.e. not my holiday snaps). Anything else may be speedily deleted!

I am still a new user. Having completed the challenge, and made some contributions previously, I now have 139 contributions - but I'm still classified as a new user and my uploads are actively monitored. A new user is anybody with fewer than 150 edits on Commons. Nearly there!

Uploading from a smartphone is a hassle. From the mobile site, although you can login, there is no option to upload an image. You have to force your browser to switch to the desktop version. There are rumours of an app, but if it still exists, it is not available on the  app store in Ireland, at least.

Would I do it again?

Possibly, but not for a little while. I want to focus on my Wikipedia editing and build up to another article there.

Learning Resources and Open Access in Higher Education Institutions in Ireland

The National Forum for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education has published 2 focused research reports today. One of these is the outcome of a project, led by Angelica Risquez at the University of Limerick, and involving a team of people from University of Limerick, Dublin Institute of Technology, Mary Immaculate College, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and National University of Ireland Galway, looking at the current state of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education in Ireland.

This report provides a considered account of some of the key issues which influence the sharing of open educational resources. These include questions of awareness and understanding of open educational resources at individual as well as institutional level, and the value placed on openness as a positive incentive for academic engagement. Acknowledging the complex interplay between these factors, the study suggests important practical steps to take forward OER engagement, including: awareness raising; professional development for academic staff; capturing excellent OERs and continuing relevant and targeted research to support particular OER initiatives.

The full text of the report is available from the National Forum website.

From the report:

This project, a national analysis, set out to examine strategies for sharing open education resources (OERs) to enhance teaching and learning in Irish higher education. Drawing on the collective expertise and experience of colleagues, with on-going involvement in open education resources, the study explore current practices and potential approaches for future sharing of resources. The experiences gained through the National Digital Learning Resources project were also considered, along with options for the management and discovery of digital teaching and learning resources through local repositories. As part of the exploration focus groups were held with selected groups of academic, library, educational development and educational technologists.

 Consequently this report provides a considered account of some of the key issues which influence the sharing of open educational resources from primary data gathered and also from a survey of current research literature. The relevant issues incorporate questions of awareness and understanding of open education resources at individual as well as institutional level, and in particular the value placed on openness as a positive incentive for academic engagement and sharing. Alongside the increasing growth of social media and online sharing platforms which have altered the way resources are shared amongst some groups, there is also the question of how in an Irish context distinctive institutional missions and approaches can determine levels of OER engagement. Acknowledging the complex interplay between these factors, the study suggests important practical steps to take forward OER engagement, including: awareness raising; professional development for academic staff; capturing excellent OERs and continuing relevant and targeted research to support particular OER initiatives.


As a member of the project team, it was an honour to work again with such a dedicated group of people and it's great to see the report being launched.

A related presentation can be seen on slideshare, from the EdTech conference in UL in May.

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Wikipedia Belongs in Education

St Leonard's Hall

The EduWiki 2014 event was held on Friday 31st October in the stunning St Leonard's Hall at the University of Edinburgh. Ever since I heard Toni Sant (Education Organiser with wikimedia UK) speak at the International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference (see previous post), which led me to join the Wikimedia Ireland Community working group, I have been fascinated at the potential of using Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) to support student development in higher education. So, I was thrilled to be at the one day event in Edinburgh to find out more about the Wikimedia UK education projects.

This was always going to be a different crowd from my usual conference network, and there wasn't much tweeting in advance of the event, so I was a little nervous when I turned up at the social event on the evening before the conference. I needn't have worried, the small group that had gathered were as welcoming as could be, including a nacho-eating dog, and several wikipedians. A collection of tweets from the conference and the lead-up was captured using storify by Brian Kelly, who spoke at the event.

Floor Koudijs: Why Wikipedia is great for students

The event itself was opened the next morning by Peter McColl, Rector at the University of Edinburgh, and followed by a presentation from Floor Koudijs from the Wikipedia Education Program at the Wikimedia Foundation.  Her message was a simple one: Wikipedia belongs in Education. Using Wikipedia in the classroom, students will start as readers, but they are future contributors. There followed some discussion about academic staff attitudes to Wikipedia, where it is often not seen as a valid resource. But even academics will use it as a starting point for research, so the suggestion was: instead of fighting it, why not embrace it?

Wikimedia in Education

During the morning, we heard from a number of interesting speakers, including Wikimedians in Residence at various UK institutions including JISC, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the National Library of Scotland. Of particular interest to me was a presentation from Marc Haynes, former Wikipedian in Residence at Coleg Cymraeg, Wales, which enables teaching through Welsh in the universities in Wales. Marc described his role: working with academics across Welsh universities, training them in wiki editing, sourcing content that could be shared under a suitable Creative Commons licence, and building up content on the Welsh Wicipedia. Since NUIG has a particular responsibility to the Irish language, there would seem to be opportunities to do something similar for Vicipéid, the Irish language wiki. 

Also of immediate interst to me was a very accessible presentation from Martin Poulter, former Wikimedia ambassador at JISC. Martin spoke about his approach to academic staff development around using Wikipedia in education: a Wikipedia comprehension exercise. Rather than starting with how to edit, he demonstrated an approach which highlights academic qualities of Wikimedia articles - the quality scale, citation guidelines, peer review, authorship, collaboration, cultural differences and opportunities for translation projects. Coming at this from the angle of supporting academic integrity, rather than a focus on the technology, is a fantastic approach and one that I hope to use in the future. 

A presentation from Greg Singh, lecturer at the University of Stirling, showed Wikimedia projects in action. I was particularly impressed by the WikiBooks project Digital Media and Culture Yearbook 2014, where students worked in 12 groups of 6, to collaboratively produce an open publication. Marks were awarded for content, understanding and engagement. Student feedback was almost all overwhelmingly positive (11 out of 12 groups).

Beginners Workshop for New Campus Ambassadors and Educators

Instructor Basics

In the afternoon I attended the workshop delivered by Toni Sant and Martin Poulter  for people who are getting started, or thinking of getting started, with Wikipedia in their own institutions. The first part of this was based on the excellent Instructor Basics: How to Use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool publication. Based on 5 key policies (free content, reliable sources, neutral point of view, notability, good faith), we were led to consider different types of student assignments that can be used to help achieve various learning outcomes. 

Rather than create a new Wikipedia article, which could be quickly removed due to lack of "notability", we were encouraged to think about: translating an article (useful for building up content on Vicipéid, for example); copy editing to improve the grammar or readability of an article; uploading illustrations to Wikimedia Commons on a particular topic or theme; adding new content to an existing article; using Wikidata as the basis of an assignment. Wikipedia also has a number of sister projects that could be used as the basis of students work: Commons, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wiktionary...

At all times, the importance of interacting with the existing Wikimedia community was stressed, through writing messages on a user's talk page or on an article's talk page. This allows a student to practice skills in collaboration, not just with their classmates, but with a whole world of volunteer editors. 

Of course, students are likely to make mistakes when it comes to Wikipedia etiquette and although we were assured that the majority of Wikipedians will be supportive of fledgling editors, there are also stories of less than helpful behaviours. To support students and educators, we were introduced to the Wikipedia Education Extension which allows educators to register their institution and courses, and within this, identify clearly which articles students may be working on.

There is an impressive amount of online training for educators and for students, and my next step is to become a Campus Ambassador so that I can start to roll out projects at NUI, Galway.

WikiProject Ireland/NUIG National Monuments Editathon Nov 2014 

As a first step, I'm really excited that we are hosting our first An Vicipéid/Wikipedia Editathon this Friday!

Organised by Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge, CELT and the Wikimedia Ireland Community, the aim is to highlight the value of An Vicipéid/Wikipedia as a learning resource and to improve its quality by encouraging Irish traslation students to participate in the event. The event’s theme is The National Monuments of Ireland. This was chosen on account of the Wikimedia Ireland Community’s previous collaboration with the international photography competition Wiki Loves Monuments.

For more information see the event invitation.

No doubt you'll be hearing more about Wikipedia projects at NUIG soon!

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Wikimedia Ireland and Wiki Loves Monuments

In my role, I wear a number of different hats. Sometimes they are distinct, but often they overlap.

Apart from the use of technologies for learning, one of my major interests is in supporting academic integrity - not just plagiarism detection, but the creation of an environment where scholarly work can flourish. At the 6th International Integrity & Plagiarism conference this summer, I found these two interests overlapping in a new way (for me) in Toni Sant's keynote talk.

For a long time, I have been trying to persuade academic staff that Wikipedia is not necessarily the work of the devil. I argued that it can be a useful place for students to start researching a topic and can direct them towards more authentic and useful resources. I'd even heard of student assignments based on editing wikipedia, but I hadn't really thought too much about it.

What's wrong with Wikipedia? @tonisant #6iipc pic.twitter.com/tYWP8szPTI
— Sharon Flynn (@sharonlflynn) June 17, 2014

Toni Sant is the Education Organiser for wikimedia UK. I won't give a synopsis of his talk here, but suffice to say that I was impressed by the 5 pillars of wikipedia (which include a statement about openness) and especially excited about the Wikipedia Education Program. Who knew there was a whole bank of resources for educators and students?

At the time of the conference, I knew that I wanted to know more and to get involved. Following a twitter conversation with Toni, he put me in touch with the Wikimedia Ireland Community, a small and very new group of people interested in promoting open, wiki-based activities in Ireland. Before long, I found myself part of the group and participating in (almost) weekly meetings via skype. Moreover, I am now the proud owner of a wikimedia account, have edited a wiki and even uploaded a photo to Wikimedia Commons (of the Sage in Gateshead, where the conference took place).

I have a couple of projects in mind, based around the Wikipedia Education Program and have been talking to some people locally in NUIG about these. The Wikimedia Ireland group is very supportive, and refreshing in their enthusiasm. Next month I'll be attending the EduWiki Conference in Edinburgh, where I'm sure I'll learn lots more. I'll report back on that on this blog.

The current project that Wikimedia Ireland is promoting is Wiki Loves Monuments. This is a global photo contest, and Ireland is involved for the first time this year. The group have put a lot of effort into listing monuments, by county, on the competition page. Anybody can submit a photo (as long as it's of one of the monuments listed) during the month of September. Winners will be announced at the end of October, with an awards ceremony in mid-November.

You can follow Wikimedia Ireland on Facebook and on Twitter (@wikimediaIE). Expect to hear more from me about this new adventure. It's always good to try something new.

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NDLR Fest 2012: Let's talk about the learning

Poster by Andrew Flaus, NUIG

Last Wednesday, a group of us from CELT took the early morning train from Galway to Dublin to attend the 2012 NDLR Fest at Croke Park. A number of our NUIG Learning Innovation Projects (LIPs) from last year were included in the poster showcase, and we welcomed the opportunity to participate in an event to highlight the valuable work being done by academics across Ireland in the area of open educational resources (OER).

What was good about the event?
It seems that we are finally reaching a critical mass in terms of creating a culture of sharing and collaboration. This is wonderful to see, though I suspect it still exists in pockets of good practice, rather than being widespread.  

We are building up experience and data in the OER movement in Ireland, so that our practice can be evidence based. It was suggested that Ireland is currently "punching above its weight". I am not sure about this, but I think we are holding our own.

The OER movement is now visible to those in government, though it may have come as a bit of a surprise. Sean Sherlock, in his opening address, said he found the OER movement "refreshing" while admitting that sharing of knowledge is the foundation of higher education, and open sharing is a logical step.

What about the learning?

Panel with Paul Gormley and Catherine Cronin of NUIG

I was concerned about the way language was being used at the NDLR Fest. People spoke about developing, delivering, packaging and pushing (resources, content, eLearning). There was very little discussion of teaching and learning, and little mention of students (with some notable exceptions). Isn't this just reinforcing the student as consumer model?

There was a lot of talk about quality of the learning resources developed and what role there is for peer review. I think we are in danger of reinforcing the academic as gatekeeper of knowledge (as promoted by Mr Sherlock) instead of recognising that students will go to wherever they find the most useful information. We need to be thinking more about how we can teach our students to be digitally literate, to be able to evaluate critically whatever information they come across and how to gather it into useful collections. See this recent presentation from Dr Nick Pearce on Students (and Staff) as Content Scavengers.

Natalie Lafferty wrote a lovely piece recently Why can't learning repositories be more like Slideshare? We need to make it easier for academics to contribute and share their resources, and easier to find and access useful resources for their own context. This relates to Brian Mulligan's observation about a "rate my resource" tool, and his question which was given so little consideration during the panel session.

Why are we still talking about eLearning? 
During the event, the word "eLearning" was used by many to mean a package of content. But content does not imply learning!

Should we drop the 'e'? Or can we debate about what it stands for? Steve Wheeler wrote a provocative piece on this issue last year: Dropping the 'e'.

For me, it's all just learning. Some of it is face to face, some of it is online, some of it is formal, some informal. We don't need to differentiate, it's just a continuum of blending.

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NDLR Fest 2012 and Local Innovation Projects

Tweet I see from today's NDLR newsletter that Minister Seán Sherlock will launch the 2012 NDLR Fest in Croke Park on 2nd May. Of course, Seán Sherlock is infamous for signing the Irish copyright amendment (also known as the Irish SOPA) into law last month, without public consultation and despite more than 80,000 signatures on an online petition (stopsopaireland). It will certainly be interesting to hear his views on the notion of people collaborating and sharing freely their digital learning resources.

The NDLR Fest, now in its 6th year, is a nice event to attend. The community is friendly and open and there is a great buzz generated. The aim of the event, according to the NDLR conference website, is to showcase the wide array of free technology enhanced learning that has been generated across all subject disciplines in the Irish HE sector as well as celebrating the cooperative and collaborative process in which these resources have been developed, used and reused.

You can sign up for this one-day, free event by going to the registration page. 

This year, as well as hearing about the 12 Learning Innovation Community Support projects (LInCS),  we are also looking forward to showcasing six Local Innovation Projects (LIPs) from NUI Galway that received NDLR funding in 2011.

Our call for NDLR funded LIPs for 2012 closed two weeks ago. This year the applications for LIPs were competitive, with 14 innovative proposals being submitted for funding.  Due to budgetary constraints we have only been able to fund a total of 7 projects. A full list of the successful applicants is now on our website.

Oepncast expands

UC Berkeley has had a proud tradition of webcasting lectures, interviews and other content and we here in Galway have long been fans of their work which preceded the growth of youTube and iTunes. Now they have received funding to develop the OpenCast Matterhorn platform for lecture capture and video content sharing with an intended release sometime in 2010. If all goes to plan this will provide an Open Source alternative to the commercial solutions for lecture capture, although much of the development and sales effort from such companies in recent times has focused on providing resilient, simple, all-in-one hardware solutions and that might well still be an issue. Nonetheless, Matterhorn sounds really exciting and we are pleased to be part of its widening community. You can learn more from this overview and by visiting the project website.

Britain goes Open

JISC, the Higher Education Academy and England's Funding Council (HEFCE) today launched the new Open Educational Resources porgramme. The programme, which builds on earlier work and combines initiatives such as Jorum, CETIS and InfoNet, has ambitious but achievable aims.

"The programme will make the equivalent of 5,000 undergraduate modules of existing learning resources freely available online. Projects will be working towards being able to sustainably release a much larger pool of resources over a longer period.

The funded projects will run for 12 months and will end on 30 April 2010."

More info is available on JISCs website.

Open Educational Repositories – Share, Improve, Reuse

The 2009 IntraLibrary Repository Conference will be held on 25-26 March 2009 in Edinburgh.

Abstracts are being accepted until this Friday, 6th February. The theme this year is on Open Educational Repositories, and papers are being sought in any of the following areas:

What does it mean to be “Open”? – How do you make the resources in your repository easily discoverable? This may be related to interfaces, or search tools, or awareness raising, links to other applications, or anything else that increases the exposure and use of resources in repositories.

Share, improve, reuse – Why do people use resources? What types of resource do they use? How easy do they find it to discover/adapt/reuse resources?

Evidence for sharing resources – Intrallect has recently completed a major project on behalf of JISC “Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials” which will be presented during the conference. Other presentations on the evidence for sharing are welcomed.

The registration deadline is 27th February. For more information contact events@intrallect.com

Open Educational Resources - panel session

Well that was interesting, even if at times there was a slightly 'retro' feel to some of the presentations and points being made. A colleague muttered in my ear "that was so 1999, wasn't it?" - a really bitter remark for those in geekdom. I guess part of the issue was that the talks were of a fairly general level, largely explaining repository models, but to be fair they did highlight on some of the challenges and reasons why the rapid growth in open education resources hasn't happened yet. 

Although every speaker mentioned the importance of IPR (intellectual property rights) as a challenge and some commented how there is widespread ignorance amongst teachers and academic staff about the implications of copyright (including creative commons) and that it is possible to still use things like CC to make a profit if so desired, one of the key stumbling blocks that none of the panel raised is that in much of daily practice in education people make use of diagrams from textbooks, video materials from a variety of sources, numerical examples from elsewhere, etc. In other words, we are actually closer in some ways to the copyright breaching, mix-remix subculture than perhaps many are prepared to admit. Rather than it always being the case that academics don't contribute to digital repositories because they want to jealously guard their own content, I suspect in some (many?) cases it is because they don't actually own the content they use in their teaching. This is something that can be seen in things like MIT and the Open University initiatives, where you might notice gaps in the materials provided for many of these courses, where copyright for a particular image, diagram or case study is actually owned by a commercial publisher or some other colleague.

Part of the outdated feel my colleague was referring to though, was the use of Lego (TM) to explain re-purposable content. There was an almost audbile groan when the first lego block appeared on screen. So there's still life in the old metaphor yet it would seem. However, I guess for those for whom  open content is a new concept this is useful, though that would only be a minority of people in this audience based on the show of hands at the start.

Nonetheless, from my own point of view, the talks were clear and helpful. Richard Baraniuk spoke very well and made some really good points not just in the presentation but also in the Q&A afterwards. He emphasised the reality of the approach to producing open textbooks quite powerfully by handing around a printed example of a collaborative text (as in the picture) and the numbers he used with regards to the California Community Colleges, where the costs of the texts outstrips tuition fees, was powerfully made. 

Francesc Pedro of the OECD, summarised their report entitled "Giving Knowledge for Free" and highlighted the moral dilemma they had with the report in that OECD normally charges for their reports. Given the title they had to offer this as a free download!

Rachel Bruce summarised JISC's approach to open content and repositories and talked about the next stages, using JORUM as the principal platform.

Artur Dyro, representing the commercial sector took a brave stand on the podium but was good natured and light hearted. His concluding remark was also well-received where he pointed out that without the commercial sector we would have no sponsored lunches at conferences like this in the future. A call for collaboration if ever there was one.

The Open University launches new 'OU View' channel

The Open University launched their 'OU View' YouTube channel today.

There are over 300 videos available to view, along with series of video blogs where Open University staff and students talk about what they’ve learnt from YouTube.

OU View (http://www.youtube.com/ou) acts as a portal to other Open University channels, such as OU Learn, and OU Life. The Open University also plans to launch a research channel later on in the year.

knol vs wikipedia

Google's 'rival to wikipedia,' known as Knol is now being made more widely available. Edits to articles can only be approved by the page authors and the aim is to have a more authoritative encyclopedia than the ever popular wikipedia. Example articles on display in the home page include those on leukemia and unblocking toilets.