Title: Pedagogical daily posts
Course: FLO MicroCourse: Exploring a World of Open in the WikiVerse OER > Section: Tips and Resources

(we can move these, one per day, to the Open or Explorations forum)

1.  Pedagogical Ideas - First Steps

If you're curious about how to develop your practice using open pedagogies, we encourage you to explore the daily examples we will share. If you have questions or comments you can post in the Open Forum throughout the week.

Wikimedia projects can be a rich resource to develop your skills, broaden your collection of teaching and learning strategies, and engage yourself and your students in active and open learning.

Today's suggestions include some easy ways to begin participating and contributing to the open community (for you and your students).

Check out UBC's Open Resources Challenge page. These examples can be used to engage your students in developing their digital literacies and could easily be aligned with your specific course topic or issue.

Here are a few ideas from the UBC Open Challenges site:

1.  Take a look at the Add something to an image and post it for re-use  You could choose this approach to encourage students to share to Wikimedia Commons.

2.  Use this outline to develop your own activity - Add a Citation to Wikipedia.  Note that the link embedded in UBC's outline goes to the wrong page - start looking for pages that need citations in Wikipedia by clicking on this Citation Hunt page. You'll be asked to add a reliable source or you can move onto another option.

For more ideas, take a look at the resources in https://wiki.ubc.ca/Documentation:Teaching_With_Wikipedia.

2. Pedagogical Ideas:  Wikidata

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and others. Wikidata also provides support to many other sites and services beyond just Wikimedia.

Note that Wikidata recently added their ninety millionth item , about the galaxy "ZFOURGE UDS 19909".

Which subject areas might benefit from a Wikidata activity? You may wish to browse these for ideas:

- Using Wikidata as an Educational Platform (conference in 2017)
- Wikidata educational resources

It would be best to start with a couple of very short & easy (even for non-techie people!) Wikidata Tours to get your head around the nature of structured data. Try the first 3 tours & decide which ones to assign your students. Then consider assigning:

- a Tourism class to collect data on local points of interest
- an Indigenous studies or botany class to record (if appropriate) indigenous names for local plant species
- a Music class to collect data on musicians in your city or region (see example below).

For an example of a Wikidata exercise involving local musicians, have a look at the raw data for Buffy St. Marie. You can see how getting a class to collect data on a specific community or body of knowledge (Canadian music, in this example) could be educational & useful. It would be fairly easy for someone else to come along & flesh out a Wikipedia article based on this data.

3.  Pedagogical Ideas:  Wikipedia

Are you interested in developing your students' digital learning skills or moving them along the continuum of information consumer to information producer?

Here are two stories about BC-based past projects that involved students in improving or creating Wikipedia entries.

1. Murder, Madness, and Mayhem - Latin American Literature in Translation
2. Human Ecology - Wikipedia Projects

Since 2008, UBC professor Jon Beasley-Murray has used Wikipedia in his Spanish 312 classroom. He began by assigning students to edit and create Wikipedia articles on texts and authors they were reading in class. Ambitiously, he also stipulated that these articles should meet Wikipedia's “featured article” status. Beasley-Murray discovered that this activity helped his students deepen their understanding of writing, revision and research as a process. Because students were challenged by other Wikipedia editors throughout the review process, they were encouraged to think about academic writing in a new way.

Interested in how a couple of UBC students felt about writing a Wikipedia article? See this entry in Clint Lalonde's blog: Student views on a Wikipedia project.

When Professor Rosie Redfield took over the Human Ecology course, she threw away the exams and replaced them with meaningful, experiential projects. One of the course projects was to improve or add a page to Wikipedia that had some relevance to Vancouver ecology. See some past project in this excerpt (opens pdf) from the course archives.

Redfield reported that the most challenging aspect of the Wikipedia course for students was understanding how Wikipedia works (e.g., referencing your statements and remaining neutral in your writing).

4.  Pedagogical Ideas:  Communicating science - Wikipedia/media

Instructors in the UK have been integrating the use of Wikipedia in their classroom too.

Students studying Science Communications as part of their Biochemistry and Biologicals Sciences BSc can choose to contribute to Wikipedia - articles and illustrations or other media.

Dr. Steve Cook encouraged his students to contribute to Wikipedia, partly to help them practice their science communication skills but also to do some payback "...as they're using Wikipedia all the time." [1]

The students take workshops run by staff and learn how to contribute articles following the Wikipedia guidelines. Dr. Cook encourages them to provide supporting media. They explore potential topics of interest to a wide audience through research what exists on Wikipedia that needs improvement. Their projects are reviewed for accuracy and relevance, before being submitted. [2]

The Wikipedia project has been part of the course for 8 years and students have:

- improved 100 articles since 2012
- created and contributed several illustrations and photographs

[1]  Wikimedia in Education-Wikimedia UK in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, Jan 1, 2020, CC-BY-SA 4.0 International

[2] Imperial College London, Innovations in learning. Steve Cook - giving back, retrieved Aug 4, 2020 from https://www.imperial.ac.uk/about/leadership-and-strategy/provost/vice-provost-education/innovations-in-learning/steve-cook---giving-back/

Complete report available in Tips and Resources section - Pedagogical Applications

5.  Pedagogical Ideas:  Indigenous Perspectives Edit-a-thon

Dr. David Gaertner is a librarian and indigenous studies instructor whose course in Representation & Indigenous Cultural Politics (FNIS220) has used Wikipedia to help students examine Indigenous identity, politics and cultural traditions through a Wikipedia gap analysis (worth 25% of the course grade). Students in his course were assigned to identify information gaps, biases, exclusions and assumptions about "neutrality" in relation to settler colonialism.

BCcampus staff member Erin Fields partnered with Dr. Gaertner in a research project that evolved into an ambitious Indigenous Edit-a-thon. The 2019 event reached out beyond the classroom to invite anyone "seeking to improve the coverage of Indigenous writers on Wikpedia" to participate in reviewing and editing Wikipedia entries.

A bit of history:   At York University, in 2016, digital humanities librarian Stacy Allison-Cassin led a team effort to use Wikipedia to raise the profile of Indigenous knowledge.

Did you know?   The Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture, Daniel Heath Justice started a hashtag #HonouringIndigenousWriters in December 2015 to encourage people to spotlight one Indigenous writer every day for a year.

If you want to try organizing an edit-a-thon, check out the Wikipedia how-to guide or the article by Ellen Oredsson documenting her efforts in organizing an Art+Feminism event focused on Women in Art in Asia.

If you're interested in the surge of Indigenous culture and literature being shared through digital representations, you will enjoy the story about the new app that links location with Indigenous culture through augmented reality!