Sanika Prakash
Hi, I’m Sanika. I’m going into my fourth year of History of Art and English Literature and I’ve rejoined ISG for my second summer internship with the OER Service. This summer, I’ve worked on website migration towards integrating the existing Open.Ed website currently on WordPress over onto EdWeb 2, which is the University’s web estate.  Merging it into the University site will help it to be found easily. And also migrating all of the posts of open education resources to the Blogs.Ed service, which is also run by the University.

Charlotte Ness
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 OER Service adapts and openly publishes so that educators all across the globe can use them.

The main bulk of my internship has involved editing the raw textual content of 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, working as a co-author and editor alongside several other colleagues across the university, which has taught me so much about the various behind-the-scenes editorial stages of such a project.

 

Sanika Prakash
I did quite a similar job to Charlotte for about 8 months last year, over the summer and into semester one. 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. 

 

What have we learned about Open Education?

Sanika Prakash
Going into my first internship, I vaguely knew what open licensing was because I helped freelance a lot of designs for my friends in societies or musical productions. 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.

So open licences and the Creative Commons were 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 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. I’ve become 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 open licensed materials that I could adapt for my lessons, 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.

What have we specifically developed in our roles? 

Charlotte Ness  
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. Just developing that understanding of office etiquette. It’s been so reassuring to find that everyone’s input is valued, especially amongst the student interns, and there’s no real feeling of hierarchy. I’ve been included in many projects and had my voice and opinions heard as an equally valuable member of the team. So that’s been really nice.

I’ve also enjoyed participating in a few Wikipedia Editathons, learning how to edit articles on Wikipedia and contribute to that vast database of open knowledge! It’s been especially fun to visit the National Library of Scotland to engage directly with archival materials like newspapers and flyers from the early days of the Fringe festival. The level of meticulousness required to create a Wikipedia article from scratch as well as edit existing ones (e.g. updating citations and clarity of expression) is a practiced skill I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to develop.

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 the biggest thing I’ve developed in this internship is that as a Humanities student, I don’t think of myself as a technical person. But I’ve been hired to do a whole website migration!

I’ve created a mock-up of a new website within the university’s website builder. I’ve edited and checked the contents and licensing and it’s all very technical work.  Building a website, I didn’t think you’d give that to a Humanities student. I thought of it as a computer science skill, but I have actually done website creation before in my own spare time, for the publications that I work at and the Edinburgh magazine which is a student arts and culture magazine.

It’s been fascinating to see how all of the things I do outside of work and university have manifested into job skills. I didn’t expect that to be a path I could have taken. Now I know that the things I do for fun are also useful skills that I have.

I also now 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 LinkedIn Learning courses and applied what I learned to the migration project. I think this project is 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 transferable skills that will likely always have their place. I have been using a lot of Microsoft Office, Word, PowerPoint, Excel for asset registers, and the occasional Canva document. Taking WordPress training courses on LinkedIn Learning has also proved useful. Now I plan on using it more in the future and maybe even starting my own blog. (Maybe I shouldn’t be mentioning this here because then I’m going to be held accountable for that!)

One of the aspects of this internship I’ve appreciated is that we’ve been able to dedicate a portion of our 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 
One of my personal projects was to relearn and improve my French to improve my employment opportunities. After 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. But I could just have the French playing in the background while I was auditing. It’s the same thing with crochet. I can’t just crochet. I need to have something in the background. It depends on what I’m doing. 

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

Sanika Prakash
What was unexpected was the logistics, 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, people go on sabbaticals, people go on leave, and so much of working on a publication is the communication of people working on it.

Charlotte Ness
Yes, it’s a hugely collaborative task. So many people are involved at every stage and it takes clear and consistent communication to keep everyone in the loop at all times. I had previously taken for granted the existence of open textbooks, not realising just how much work they entail.

So it’s been wonderful to gain a proper insight on that process. And, more importantly, to have such a significant role within it all – for the Teaching Matters ebook, I’ve been involved in not just the editorial aspect of the work in reviewing all of the individual blog posts to be included and accumulating editorial feedback to pass on to authors, but also in writing my own introductory section to the book, reflecting on the notions of belonging and community at the university from a student’s perspective.

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

Charlotte Ness 
Yes. And the thought of seeing my name in the acknowledgements!

Sanika Prakash
I know! That’s so fun. I remember in school, like every time we’d get assigned a new textbook, I’d be like, oh, not another one. But now I’ve gotten really passionate about them, especially at a University level where, presumably, most people actually want to pursue their degrees.

I think having openly licensed textbooks is really beneficial. And thinking about how the learning experience would be through the textbook, how it’s going to be structured, how are we going to like highlight certain parts of the book for key ideas and call emphasis to things.

Last year I reformatted an entire textbook and we had to think about how to put tables in an EPUB format and how to organise information. It’s so interesting to see the organisational and technical side of a completed e-book.

I think we as students have been very privileged to do that.

Charlotte Ness   
With Teaching Matters a huge focus of the book has been to bridge together different perspectives and lived experiences across the university, from widening participation or mature access students, students within the LGBTQ+ community, students with disabilities or accessibility requirements, and even student societies or individuals forming discussions around the importance of mental health while at university.

It’s a mixture of staff and student-led events showcasing different approaches to teaching and learning. And compiling of all these unique perspectives in a textbook, not just giving a singular, distinct opinion or approach to teaching and learning is invaluable. 

  
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 lagging behind what technology allows us to do, and I think we’re in a 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. 

I’ve always been very hesitant to use any of the material generated by AI in any open licensed workbooks, textbooks or teaching materials on TES resources. I think we’re in a kind of a dangerous place where…. as openly licensed material, it’s available 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. 

I think having a sort of publishing experience before we enter the workforce, 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 each of us, but I think it’s going to get very difficult with people’s intellectual property rights with AI. 

Especially as we are both English Literature students and it’s frustrating to see so many old books just being destroyed for the sake of teaching AI or essays just written with AI. 

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 degrees really, the whole premise of the humanities, and of the value of individual interpretation.

Sanika Prakash 
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.

I think there are lots of people that are moving towards a rejection of AI. And I think that’s heartening to see, especially being 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.

Let’s talk career goals and how they relate to what we’ve learnt through this internship.

Sanika Prakash
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 like to be very personal and private about my work, and I think helping artists and writers get a platform is so, so important. It’s one of the most important parts of the creative process when people want to share with the world.  This internship has really allowed me to see how publishing can platform creators. 

I’ve gained so much experience with Creative Commons licensing in publishing and working with Edinburgh Diamond, the University of Edinburgh’s open publishing platform which is dedicated to open licensed teaching and educational materials, journals, and colouring books! 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.

I think it’s set me up really well for where I want to go in managing other people’s work and art. 
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 definitely appeals to me massively, but it’s a conscious effort at this stage to not fixate on a particular career path and remain open to all sorts of different opportunities. Working with translation and interpretation also interests me, as someone with a love for modern languages.

For the former, this internship experience, with its specific projects and the people I have met (besides the wonderful Charlie and Lorna, of course) – for instance Rebecca, the manager of Edinburgh Diamond, has exposed me to a plethora of different opportunities and paths available within both academic and trade publishing. So that is definitely guiding me in the right direction.

It is possible, even though it all seems quite daunting. 

What is it like socially as an intern?

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. Argyle House had a larger lunch area, but people were sequestered in their own zones. 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. It’s been lovely to be able to leave the office and easily come back within the hour. To 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 
I think being part of a whole cohort of student interns, all in the same boat, is quite a unique position to be in. For many of us, this is our first office job and we’re all eager to learn about each other’s roles and backgrounds. It’s a lovely opportunity to make new friends and meet people from different departments in the university, and attempt to make sense of their complex tech-undertakings that sound like a foreign language to humanities students like myself. Yeah, it’s been a wonderful opportunity to make new acquaintances and have interesting conversations.

Sanika Prakash 
It’s also 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 editathons over our degrees not being what we thought of as skills for working at an 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 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.

 

What about styles of management and working for ISG?

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 responsibility 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 important 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, we’re lucky enough to have a really good relationship with our managers.

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 will provide a lot of structure because going into 4th year, you don’t really have that many contact hours as a Humanities student. 

I think continuing with this project, actually seeing through the whole website migration 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 was involved in 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! I would very much have loved to also have mine extended, but as I’m going to be studying abroad, it won’t be possible. However, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of coming back next year! 

Sanika Prakash 
Next summer, exactly. And everyone wanted to keep you on but they couldn’t do it with you living outside of the UK. 

Charlotte Ness 
You’ve now had two very different experiences with the internship because you started off with what I’m currently doing, the editing and publishing, and you’re now working on the  more technological back-end of things. How do you feel about continuing with this role, despite it perhaps feeling detached from your usual skillset?

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 and are on top of your other work. We need someone to design badges for us. And I sat there designing these little badges and I was like, whoa, this is like, this is brilliant.

So I really, really value the ISG and being able to bring all sorts of skills to the job.

I like being thrown into a project and then mess around to figure out how things work. I mean, messing around has made me find at least three different bugs in the systems. I flagged up blogs.ed not working after a new update when I was testing different templates. And I also found another issue with the padding of different elements in Drupal when I was experimenting with the web layout and formats. So I mean, I’m not a very techie person, but curiosity and messing around with the tools to see what happens when I try something out has helped me find all types of issues.

Would you consider ISG in the future?

 

Charlotte Ness 
Oh, absolutely. I really enjoy the general dynamics here, the variety of work that needs completing, and the way everyone’s input is valued. Especially as students, it’s been a wonderful first-job experience giving us proper insight into the real-world workplace!