The EdTech Wikipedia edit-a-thon [1944] Members : #OER18

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Public Group Active 6 years, 7 months ago

Wed, Apr 18 2018, 1:30pm – 2:30pm

Authors: Ewan McAndrew

Room: Waterside 1

Theme: OER and Others

Type: Workshop/Panel

Description

A new study has found that Wikipedia remains the most popular information site around. (LaFrance, 2016). Yet, it has been estimated that if it were truly the “sum of all knowledge” then English Wikipedia should have at least 104 million articles instead of the 5.5 million it currently holds. Gaps exist, the way information is represented online matters. 90% of Wikipedia’s editors are male and there are only 3,000 very active Wikipedians curating the world’s knowledge.

Wikipedia editing events, or ‘editathons’, are valuable opportunities for collaborating with subject experts, and to involve students and the public. This workshop will be of interest to participants as a powerful way of contributing to the dissemination of scholarship around the world. The workshop will help people think about and enhance their open practice, and that of their students.

87.5% of students report using Wikipedia for their academic work (Selwyn and Gorard, 2016) so for many students this will be the first port-of-call when engaging with articles around education technology. Trusted more than the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph (Jordan, 2014), Wikipedia receives some 17 billion pageviews from 500 million visitors each month and is estimated to be 1,500 times more cost effective than traditional ways of spreading information, such as presenting at academic conferences (Heilman, Masukume, Kipersztok, Shafee and Diptanshu, 2017).

During this workshop session, a short training period will allow delegates to experience a brief demonstration of training in an edit-a-thon. Participants should therefore bring a laptop with them in order to take part. A short editing practical with support from tutors will give experience of editing Wikipedia articles focused on education & learning technology.

Delegates will be able to share experiences, reflect on their own learning and identify actions towards running Wikipedia editathons at their own institutions.

As a result of the session, delegates will:

Know key steps involved in designing, preparing and delivering a Wikipedia edit-a-thon.
Have basic Wikipedia editing skills.
Have exchanged experiences with others and gained ideas for application in their own context.

Education technology articles identified as needing work already:

Lecture Capture/Recording.
Adaptive Learning
Technology enhanced learning – does not exist at all.
E-learning – does not exist at all.
Flipped classroom.
MOOCs.

The reason being that when we explain these topics to students – why wouldn’t they look them up on Wikipedia? And what they tend to find is American examples, old citations, pages conflating theory with practice etc.

We can fix that.

We can edit.

References

LaFrance, A. (2016). The Internet’s Favorite Website. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/people-love-wikipedia/482268/
Jordan, W. and Jordan, W. (2014). YouGov | British people trust Wikipedia more than the news. [online] YouGov: What the world thinks. Available at: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/08/09/more-british-people-trust-wikipedia-trust-news/
Selwyn, N. and Gorard, S. (2016). Students’ use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of use and perceptions of usefulness. The Internet and Higher Education, 28, pp.28-34. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.004
Heilman, James; Masukume, Gwinyai; Kipersztok, Lisa; Shafee, Thomas; Das, Diptanshu (2017). “Updating Wikipedia should be part of all doctors’ jobs”. STAT.