[]1A couple of weeks ago I attended
OER14 up in Newcastle with Martin Poulter and I going to represent
[Wikimedia UK]2 (who generously funded us). The conference theme
was ‘Building communities of open practice’ and is a well established
conference for those interested in Open Educational Resources (and Open
Educational Practices which has, for good reason I think, become the
more fashionable term). I was slightly concerned we’d be doing a bit of
‘preaching to the converted’. However, I was very pleased to see that,
although everyone there ‘buys in’ to the Open cause, many didn’t really
think about Wikipedia, the value of working with it, or the fact that
Wikipedia is arguably a) the largest OER ever, and b) the most
successful Open Educational Community of Practice ever. Those are
cool things, and we really need to get that message across! Martin and
I both took as many booklets of various types (including the education
ones) that we could carry (actually, probably more than we should
have been carrying!) but they were all snapped up with interest. So, the
two days were a very interest opportunity to meet some new people, meet
people I already knew in a slightly different context, and think about
how we can ‘onboard’ more of this already sympathetic group to our
community. Martin and I ran three events over the days (I’ll talk about
the two I was involved in below), but actually I think the conversations
over the days were just as productive if not more so. From those I’d
highlight two interesting experiences: 1. A very well known academic
raised with me regarding an ‘articles for deletion’ process on a
conference in his area. The AfD decision was to ‘keep’ the article, but
in any case the academic wasn’t asking for intervention, but rather for
some explanation of what was going on (and any input there). Having gone
off and done some research, this is an interesting area – establishing
the notability of very important (but sometimes niche) journals,
conferences, and learned societies is challenging. I’m in the process of
writing this up for a blog post, which will appear [here]3. 2. A
few times I found myself noting ‘Content is not your product’ – it’s a
slogan the OER folk are sympathetic to (they wouldn’t be giving away
resources for free otherwise), but it’s still interesting that they
don’t use Wikipedia resources as much as one might think, and of course
(as I noted at this [Nexters event]4) we need to get the message
across to other educators and innovators.# Citation needed: Editing
Wikipedia, a hands on fringe event
On the second day of the conference Martin and I ran a lunchtime fringe
event, which about 14 people came by to (some just popped in) – turns
out that’s plenty of people to have a quite detailed and expansive
conversation about the Wikimedia projects, how people might get
involved, experiences people have already had, etc. A few of the
attendees already had accounts, and some were going to go away and sign
up (and were interested to see features such as the visual editor, the
cite tool, etc.). We also went over some of the basics of the ‘talk’
page, viewing histories, etc. As well as some of the things the
Wikimedia movement engages in including the [Wikipedia
assignments]5. We also had some more policy based discussions
around establishing [notability]6, [neutral point of view]7,
as well as some discussion on projects (especially the
[Wikiproject:Open]8) and some articles in need of attention there.
The session was a really interesting opportunity to chat to a group with
a range of experiences on Wikipedia, and I think that was valuable. I
would have liked to have more time to talk to people individually, and
think about how to get people editing in such a short space (especially
on the Open articles), it also demonstrated the challenges of getting
follow-up details from people in these sort of ad-hoc events (obviously
I could give cards and brochures out). This is something to think about
for next time anyway, although there’s a balancing act between going
with the constructive unstructured discussion, and trying to tick
specific goals, we did ask what people were likely to do next and it’d
be really nice to be able to follow up on that!# Analysing learning
through Mediawiki
[]9My lightening talk (SLOW lightening
at 15 mins total!) was a modified reprisal of my talk on thinking about
the practices of open education, and how Mediawiki supports analysing
those. This holds a couple of potential benefits: First we can support
communities to help develop their members, and second if we have
paradata (useage data) on resources, we can start to think about which
resources should be targeted at which learners (the linkedup project is
aiming at this). The [slides can be downloaded]10 from the
website, and I think the video will also appear there at some point.
Given the interest within the OER community on badging, and the
importance of both community and technology for maintaining communities
of Open Practitioners, the talk was quite popular (25-30 people, in fact
the session was standing room only – nothing like a sweaty room!). This
also gave me another opportunity to plug the Wikimedia educational work
(and brochures) and answer interesting questions on how the Wikimedia
community (and researchers beyond that community) analyses Wikipedia
(,etc.) data, what that means, what issues there are, and so on. Again,
lots of interest shown and loads of questions at very different levels!
So, sympathetic to the cause, but with really varying levels of
knowledge around how to engage, and how the Wikimedia projects might be
useful in educational contexts.
