Sanika Prakash
Hi, I’m Sanika. I am going into my fourth year of History of Art and English Literature and I’ve rejoined the ISG for my second summer internship with the Open Education Resources Service. This summer, I’ve been working on website migration, so I’ve been working towards integrating the existing Open.Ed website by migrating it over to EdWeb 2, which is the university’s proprietary web estate. And that merges it into the University branding and helps it be found easily, while also migrating all of the actual posts that point towards repositories to the Blogs.Ed service, which is also run by the University.

Charlotte Ness
And I’m Charlotte. I’m going into my third year of French and English Literature – where I’ll be studying abroad, in France – and for the past three months I have been working with the ISG as an Open Educational Resources intern, contributing to the ever-growing collection of teaching materials that the university’s Open Ed service adapts and openly publishes so that educators all across the globe can use them. The main bulk of my internship has involved editing these materials and putting my new knowledge of copyright and Creative Commons licences to use, scouring open repositories of graphics on Wikimedia Commons, Openverse, Europeana, etc and then collating them into asset registers. I’ve also been directly involved in the production of two open e-books, which has given me the opportunity to learn so much about the elaborate process of such a project. It’s been really interesting to witness firsthand the behind-the-scenes editorial stages of the book and work as a co-author alongside so many colleagues across the university.

Sanika Prakash
I did quite a similar job to Charlotte for about 8 months last year, over the summer and semester 1. I was the Open Textbook Creation Intern, where I helped design the workflows and project management documents, helping set up how the Open Textbook service would be run step by step and how we would contact authors, how we would organise the editing stages and whatnot, as well as working with the Geoscience Outreach course and materials and even getting to edit an open textbook, Fundamentals of Music Theory, 2nd edition. So, it’s been really rewarding to see Charlotte actually putting the service that I helped get on its feet into use.

Charlotte Ness
Do you want to talk about what you’ve learned about Open Education?

Sanika Prakash
Sure. Going into my first internship, I vaguely knew what open licensing was because I helped freelance a lot of designs to my friends that were in societies or musical productions. And I knew that in order to use graphics that I found online, they would have to be openly licensed so I didn’t have to pay for them.
And that’s why open licences and the Creative Commons have always been on my periphery, but I didn’t realise how integrated it was in real life. For example, Wikipedia is completely openly licensed. There’s so many repositories out there. And once I found out that there’s a whole world out there that, you know, provides easily free, accessible, reusable materials, I thought this is probably something that all students should know about. With the rising cost of textbooks and the rise of piracy, I feel as if piracy would reduce if the learning materials weren’t completely financially inaccessible to students. And that’s why I’ve become very, very passionate about Open Education since starting my internships.

Charlotte Ness
My experience with Open Education prior to this internship was mostly limited to the resources I had engaged with as an English tutor; I was already quite familiar with TES Resources from having downloaded free and openly licensed materials that I could adapt for my lessons, just simple worksheets and grammar activities. That gave me a bit of an insight into how these licences work, but was only scraping the surface in comparison to the real complexities of copyright I explored in the first weeks of this internship. It’s something that I will remain very conscious of in my future academic research or personal projects, making sure I have done my due diligence with the copyright laws attached to specific materials to avoid infringement.

Sanika Prakash
What have we specifically developed in our roles? 

Charlotte Ness  
For me, I think the fundamental experience of working in an office environment for the first time and engaging with colleagues across the institution has been really gratifying. It’s been so reassuring to find that everyone is… there’s no real feeling of hierarchy or like, that the opinions and input of student interns aren’t as valid or important because I’ve been really included in a lot of projects and my voice has definitely been heard in places where I wouldn’t have expected it to be so important. So that’s been really nice. I’ve developed that kind of understanding of just office etiquette.

Also on a side note, something I didn’t expect to be working on at all, Wikipedia editing. We’ve been involved in a lot of Wikipedia editathons where we’ve started researching and using archival materials also from the National Library of Scotland to fill in gaps in digital knowledge online.

Sanika Prakash
I agree. I’ve loved doing the Wikipedia editing. I feel like I can take so much of what I’ve learned in one of my courses, which was about feminist artists from the 1980s that are forgotten today. And they don’t even have Wikipedia pages, even though they were groundbreaking with their research and exhibitions. So I was able to take all of that research that I did for my course and put that on an openly accessible website, Wikipedia, the digital encyclopaedia. 

I think probably the biggest thing I’ve developed in this internship is, well, as a Humanities student, I don’t really, I’m not a very techie person, or at least I don’t really have the impression of being very techie. And I’ve been given a whole website migration. So I’ve been told to create a mock-up of a new website within the university’s website builder. I’ve been told to edit and check contents and licensing and it’s all very technical. Building a website, you don’t really give a Humanities student that. It’s quite a computer science thing, but I’ve done it before in my own spare time. So I’ve done it for the publications that I work at, the edi magazine which is a student arts and culture magazine. I’ve created their website. And I do have quite a bit of experience working with WordPress. It’s been fascinating to see how all of the little things I did outside of work and university have actually manifested into a job. And I just didn’t really expect that to be a path that I could have taken. Now the things I do for fun are the skills that I have. I know how to use Excel because I’ve spent hours upon hours using it. I know how to use it in depth for project management and I’ve done courses about it. I think it’s quite an unconventional path for someone with my degree, but I’ve really enjoyed it. I think it’s set me up well for the future.

Charlotte Ness 
Absolutely. These are easily transferable skills that will come in handy. Even though my role hasn’t been as techy in the sense that I haven’t been scouring through a massive audit on Excel, I have been using a lot of Microsoft Office, Word, PowerPoint, Excel for asset registers, and the occasional Canva document. Taking WordPress training courses has also proved very useful as I plan on using it more in the future and actually maybe starting my own blog or whatever, that kind of thing. Maybe I shouldn’t be mentioning this here because then I’m going to be held accountable for that.

Sanika Prakash
No, no, you can have an anonymous blog. I had a blog through high school and I would put art and poetry on it. So I had a bit of the internet to do my own thing. And then I took it down, I think a year or so ago because I was just like, ah, someone found me from real life. And then I was, I was too perceived. But it’s really rewarding to have a space where you can talk even anonymously and you can just express yourself. It’s like a journal, but then you know that you can connect with people over it or it can help people. And you can share your creative writing. You can share your visual arts and stuff. And I loved having a blog, I really did. And I do still have anonymous accounts that I still share art and poetry on. So I would really recommend WordPress. I loved having a WordPress blog.

Charlotte Ness   
That’s definitely one of the aspects of this internship I’ve appreciated. We’ve been able to dedicate time each week to pursuing our own projects and developing new skills with our future aspirations in mind. It hasn’t just been about what we are contributing to the university, but also how we can make the most of this opportunity for ourselves.

Sanika Prakash 
I remember in my internship presentation, one of the managers later when we had a meeting said, your multitasking abilities are crazy, the fact that you were trying to relearn French while doing the web audit. Which I thought was so funny because truly the web audit didn’t take that much brain power. Like you just had to input things, check things manually, look at everything, but it wasn’t a higher sort of mega attention. And that’s why I could just have things playing in the background. It’s the same thing with crochet. I can’t just crochet. I need to have something in the background. But when I’m hyper focused on something like when I’m painting, I don’t have to have anything. But when I’m doing something that takes up half my brain power, I need something else just to input it. So it was really convenient to try and beef up my CV while working.

Charlotte Ness
What has working on the publishing side of academic textbooks made us understand as students?

Sanika Prakash
What was unexpected I guess was the logistics, like how much time it takes to put things together, because you don’t really understand how long collaboration takes. And it truly does take so long. You have to wait for emails, you have to, people go on sabbaticals, people go on leave, and so much of working on a publication is just the weighting of it.

Charlotte Ness
Yes, it’s a hugely collaborative task. So many people are involved and it just takes a very long time to rally everyone up and get everyone.
understanding what different stage we’re at with the textbook and how much more work is needed before I can progress onto the next stage. But personally, I really enjoyed being part of that, actually having insight into how all of this works because it’s not something I’ve ever experienced before. And I’ve kind of taken it for granted that all of these textbooks are produced
openly by the university and that we can just use, I’ve now come to realise just how much work that requires. And also appreciated that as a student, my voice has been heard so much in the process because I’ve been involved in not just the editorial aspect of the work in reviewing all the teaching matters, reviewing all of the individual blog posts to be included, but also writing my own section to the book, my own introduction to the reflective aspect of it, reflecting on community in the university, the idea of belonging and inclusivity, and how that improves student engagement.
the overall student experience. But it’s been, yeah, it’s been very valuable to see just how much work goes into this process and have my own input.
I appreciate it as well.

Sanika Prakash 
It’s an amazing opportunity for you, especially being able to be an actual senior editor on a genuine academic publication, especially as an undergraduate, you’ve been able to actually write something for it. 

Charlotte Ness 
Yeah.
Having my name in the acknowledgements.

Sanika Prakash
I know! That’s so fun. I think, like, especially because the whole book is about teaching matters. It’s about the methodologies of teaching, and that’s why it’s great to have a student engagement. I remember in school, like every time we’d get assigned a new textbook, I’d be like, oh, not another one. And I’d dread it. But now I’ve gotten really passionate about education. You know, they are important, especially at a University level where, presumably, most people actually want to pursue their degrees. I think having openly licensed textbooks that explain these things and are available for use is really beneficial. And thinking about how the learning experience would be through the textbook, like how it’s going to be structured, how things are going to be communicated, how are we going to like highlight certain parts of the book for key ideas and call emphasis to things. Last year I had to reformat an entire textbook and we had to think about how exactly are we going to put tables in an EPUB format and how are we going to organise information. It’s so interesting to see that sort of like the organisational and technical side of a completed e-book. So I think we as students have been very privileged to do that.

Charlotte Ness   
With teaching matters specifically as well, a huge focus of the book has been to bring together all of these different perspectives, even from students who have organised events in their societies. And so it’s a mixture of staff and student-led events and just different approaches to teaching and learning. And that
that compiling all of these different perspectives is really…
in a textbook, it’s not just giving a single, singular, distinct opinion or approach to…
to teaching and learning, but it’s just bridging all of these different experiences across the university.
which is very interesting on my side of things to actually read through and compare different, different, yeah, experiences and approaches. I don’t know, but yeah. Okay.

Charlotte Ness 
Do you want to kick us off on thoughts on AI?

Sanika Prakash 
Yeah, I think… as the world has been shifting and changing with regards to AI, it’s really interesting to see where that is going to be placed within the Creative Commons and copyright licensing. Like I remember our manager, Charlie, has mentioned that legislation is always about five years behind technology, and I think we’re in a really grey area where content does not belong to anybody when it’s created by AI, but it’s based off of other people’s work. 

And that’s why I’ve always been very hesitant to use any of the material generated by AI in any openly licensed workbooks and textbooks or teaching materials on Tes resources. I think that it’s, we’re in a kind of a dangerous place where… as openly licensed material, we are suitable for reuse, but that also does make it so much easier for a person to just input all of that into an LLM and just scrape all of that information. It’s difficult because I guess the teaching materials are there for a reason to disseminate knowledge and education. 

And it’s so complex. And I think having a sort of publishing experience in this time, especially before AI is really, well, it’s already really set off, but before we enter the workforce, I think having a step up from other graduates, at least having a background and experience in publishing is beneficial. We have the capacity for human input where we know how to collaborate, we know how to manage a large scale textbook project. That will be very beneficial for us, but I think it’s going to get very difficult with people’s intellectual property rights with AI. 

And I think it’s just a shame, especially as we are both English Literature students and it’s frustrating to see so many old books just being like destroyed for the sake of teaching AI or essays just written with AI, even though if you’re doing English literature, your career prospects aren’t stellar, so you clearly have to love the degree itself. But I think our career prospects are stellar.

Charlotte Ness 
Yeah, it’s tricky to reconcile these two conflicting sides to the debate. But on a human level, it does feel counterintuitive to be outsourcing so much of our own capacity for formulating ideas and opinions on things to a machine, to something that is basing its output on an accumulation of data. It loses the crucial individuality of our degree really, the whole premise of the humanities, and of the value of individual interpretation.

Sanika Prakash 
I think it’s also because people are less inclined to want to learn from materials that they can tell that no one’s put actual effort into making. Like, what’s the point in getting an AI to write your emails and expand on them and then getting it on the receiving end, getting an AI to summarise the e-mail?

Charlotte Ness 
Everything human about that interaction is lost, yeah.

Sanika Prakash 
And people care less about what is like the output of the AI because they can tell it’s not really written by a human. Why should they give it the time of day?

Charlotte Ness 
Social media has become rampant with that, even LinkedIn, everything.

Sanika Prakash 
Yeah. Have you seen LinkedIn’s got a new report button, going report this as AI slop?

Charlotte Ness 
Oh my goodness, no way. That’s brilliant. But that means that pretty much everything is going to get reported because all the posts that people make, well, not slop, but it’s just, it’s very clearly been formulated by an AI, even if the original ideas are still human made.

Sanika Prakash 
I think there are lots of people that are moving towards a rejection of AI. And I think that’s quite heartening to see, especially as people that are working to disseminate knowledge and original ideas to educate people. And you know what, maybe it’s not going to be all bad. I think working at this internship has made me see higher institutions are still valuing human input and there will still be a role for us within academic publishing if that’s where we both choose to go.

Charlotte Ness 
Do you want to talk a bit about your career goals and how they relate to what you’ve learnt through this internship?

Sanika Prakash
Yes. So I’ve always wanted to go towards the management of artistic outputs, for example, publishing or arts management. I would like to work within heritage, museums and galleries, or in a publishing house working with written text. Working with artists rather than producing my own work, because I feel like I like to be very personal and private about my work, but I think helping artists and writers get a platform is so, so important. I think it’s one of the most important parts of the actual creative process when people want to share it with the world. And I think that this has really allowed me to see how publishing can platform creators. 

I’ve gained so much experience with Creative Commons licensing in publishing, like Edinburgh Diamond, the University of Edinburgh’s publishing partner, which is a whole organisation that is dedicated to openly licenced teaching and educational materials, but also like colouring books. And truly, it’s so interesting to be liaising with the authors and academics of these textbooks and seeing how they want their work to be set out into the world. And I think it’s set me up really well for where I want to go in managing other people’s work and art. And I did practice French as well during this internship and that’s probably good because I’m looking at a lot of grad schemes and they all want another European language and
I think…
I will probably be okay when I graduate in a few months.
I’m excited to see where I go.

Charlotte Ness 
I’m excited for you.

Sanika Prakash   
Thank you!

Charlotte Ness 
With regards to my career prospects, The publishing industry appeals to me massively, but it’s a conscious effort to not fixate on a particular career path at this stage and remain open to all sorts of different opportunities, but this internship experience is definitely guiding me in the right direction
the specific projects that I’ve been undertaking, the people, the connections I’ve made here, being able to actually talk to people who do work. For example, the manager of Edinburgh Diamond, and hearing about all the different possibilities, all the different opportunities that are available, in this kind of industry. And it seems quite daunting at this stage, but it’s definitely…
It’s possible and yeah, with the kind of passion that I think we both share for, obviously literature, and Open Education now, as I’ve discovered.
Publishing seems like a, I don’t know what I’m saying. I think I’ll have to flesh this out a little bit better in the written form, but yeah.
Publishing is great.

Sanika Prakash 
Big up publishing.

Charlotte Ness 
For now, that’s where I’m at, that’s what I see myself doing, but.
Things like translating as well very much interest me as a…
someone studying modern languages and because I also would like to put to use the various languages I can speak and I really am interested in the complexities of translation work and interpreting things. 

Sanika Prakash 
Wonderful.

Charlotte Ness 
What did you do socially as an intern, Sanika?

Sanika Prakash 
I think moving into Forrest Hill, which is the new location of the ISG, has a lot of differences from Argyle House, which was the previous one. So Argyle House had a larger lunch area, but people were sequestered in their own zones. It was quite large and there were like zones to stick to, but at least the lunch area was big. On the other hand, Forrest Hill is very central and has lots of food options. We’ve gone to the Meadows for picnics so many times. I think that’s been lovely just being able to leave the office and easily come back within the hour, go out and get like a Civs pizza or Nile Valley or Gregg’s and then just go and sit in the Meadows and chat (when the weather was nice). We’ve played board games together. We’ve gone to Cowgate. We’ve hung out. And I think it’s been fun. In the summer when a lot of your friends aren’t around, it’s kind of, you just have no social life, then you start going a bit stir crazy in your own home, especially when you’re living alone. I think being able to hang out with the interns outside of work has been very nice, or at least creating a welcoming environment at the workplace where people can feel comfortable to just hang out and chat in the break room. Especially as student interns, we are taking up a lot of space. So that’s why the picnics were probably a good idea. 

Charlotte Ness 
So it is often quite a unique position to be in that these internships are offered to students and that there’s a whole pool of us all in the same kind of boat, which is, yeah, I think that’s quite unusual. And it’s a lovely opportunity to make new friends and meet people from different departments in the university, and learn new things about their roles and their very techy things that seem complete gibberish to the humanities students. It’s, yeah, it’s been a wonderful opportunity to meet people and make new acquaintances.

Sanika Prakash 
I think it’s so interesting to see the amount of different people that work at the ISG and the scale and the vastness of it. Other interns are also Humanities students and we’ve been able to bond at the Wikipedia workshops over our degrees not being the conventional sort of information services group. And then when you speak to other interns and they’re using Gemini to help them code this giant backend and workflow and thingy and whatnot. And it’s just, it’s just fascinating to see, wow, the ISG hires such a range of interns.

Charlotte Ness 
Because there are such a range of roles that need to be fulfilled. So much work goes  into supporting the IT backbone of the University’s operations.

Sanika Prakash 
And also from a professional level, yeah, you can make LinkedIn connections. We’re networking, I guess. But it’s so much nicer to have friends rather than a network. And then if you do need to actually network with them, it’s a lot easier because they’re your friends.

Charlotte Ness
Do you want to talk about styles of management?

Sanika Prakash 
Yeah, I think working at the ISG specifically and having Charlie as our line manager has set us up really well for the future. I think your first office job is always going to be a giant change from what you know as a uni student. But, I think you touched on it earlier that we’re given so much leeway and we’re allowed to pursue our personal projects and really get involved in the teams that we’re working with because we’re actually valued as student interns. And Charlie said this before, but she’s always wanted to set a very high standard for what a manager should be like. And I think I’ve definitely gotten used to that standard and I’m going to be judging all of my future managers by that same criteria because I feel like we’re both very valued as interns. We’re both allowed to give our inputs. We are treated very, very nicely and were actually given work, whereas you see with internships at other companies, they kind of just don’t do anything.

Charlotte Ness 
Yes. That’s very true. We are not relegated to just menial tasks and boring things.

Sanika Prakash 
I don’t think we ever had to fetch coffee for anyone. If anything, Charlie and Lorna take us out for coffee, which is so lovely.

Charlotte Ness 
Exactly, the complete opposite.
No, it’s a really nice relationship that we’ve got with our managers. Yeah, that’s quite unique to these internships.

Sanika Prakash 
I’m really lucky to have been able to extend my internship. I’m going into my 4th year and this is the second time I’ve gotten an internship extension, which I think will provide a lot of structure because going into 4th year, you don’t really have that many contact hours as a Humanities student. And if you don’t have that many contact hours, you’re prone to just sleeping the day away, especially in the winter time (or at least I do that). So I think continuing with this project, actually seeing it through the whole website migration, watching it be completely integrated in the university web estate will be very rewarding. And I will be able to point to that in the future and be like, I did that! So I’ve been very, very happy with my ISG experience, maybe even… good enough to get a return offer.

Charlotte Ness 
Yes, having your internship extended is wonderful and that’s definitely, it will be a different pace of work for you, of course, but it will be still… I mean, I mean, I just think that’s brilliant. I would very much have liked to also have mine extended, but as I’m going to be abroad, it’s not possible. However, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of next year coming back. We’ll see.

Sanika Prakash 
Next summer, exactly. And everyone wanted to keep you on anyway. It just wasn’t feasible tax wise. So at least you have that point of pride that everyone wanted to keep you on.

Charlotte Ness 
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes. But you, I mean, you’ve now had two very different experiences with the internship because you started off doing what I’m doing now and now you’re working on the much more techier side of things. But continuing on with this role, do you feel like that’s, you’re looking forward to that? That’s something you, it’s something you enjoy and you genuinely enjoy dedicating time to every week.

Sanika Prakash 
Yes, no, I remember like even last week, they were like, we don’t have enough people for the Ada Lovelace Day preparations. Sanika, you’ve got design experience. Go on, be free. Design some badges for us. And it was just like I was sat there designing these little badges and I was like, whoa, this is like, this is brilliant.

So I really, really value the ISG. I like just being thrown into a random project with no restrictions and then I just get to mess around. I mean, messing around has made me find at least three different bugs in the systems. I was the one that flagged up blogs.ed not working after a new update, and then it was shut down temporarily the next day. There was an issue with the syndication of the blogs on the actual EdWeb 2 sites. And then they flagged that up with the backend developers. And I also found another issue with the padding of different elements in Drupal. So I mean, clearly, I’m not a very techie person, but an unconventional approach has helped me find all types of issues.

Charlotte Ness 
Yes, I remember this.
That’s incredible. Yeah, you’ve been able to put to use lots of different skills and even, yeah.

Sanika Prakash
I’ve just been getting to do things and I think that that’s what the ISG has been really big on, just like letting the students do things and I’m at least giving a sort of benefit to the university.

Sanika Prakash 
Would you consider ISG in the future?

Charlotte Ness 
Oh, absolutely. I think.
I really love just the general dynamics here and the way everyone’s opinions and inputs and contributions are valuable.
Or the variety of work that needs completing, and…
Yeah, no, I think it’s a really great place to work and especially as students, we’ve been really, we’ve been really valued and it’s been a wonderful experience.

Sanika Prakash 
We can just do things and it’s quite fun. I’ve really enjoyed my time here so far, and I’m excited to take the website migration to its end.