Happy Birthday Wikipedia! Read more about Wikipedia’s 25 year history, covering its early days with a ‘then and now'(and what lies ahead), at the link below: https://wikipedia25.org/en At 25 years old it may be the olddddd man of the old Internet but Wikipedia still remains the largest reference work on the Internet and is now a […]
Blog Posts
The OER Service in 2025
2025 was an interesting year for the OER Service, especially with the range of new queries that arose from increased use of Generative AI tools across numerous new technologies, tools and services.
Intern Reflection: The End!
Over half a year has flown by since I joined the Information Services Group, and I cannot believe that my internship has come to an end. I have had the opportunity to help get the Open Textbook Creation Service going from its initial stages, and seeing the fruits of my labour has been particularly exciting recently.
Christmas and festive recipes on Wikibooks
If you’re anything like me, as the dark days bed in I start to look for treats and sparkles of all kinds to brighten up the winter days and nights. One of my favourite places to explore this time of year are the recipe sections on Wikibooks. Wikibooks is one of the Wikimedia sister projects, and is about collaboratively writing open-content textbooks that anyone (including you) can edit.
Black History Month UK 2025 – Resources
Black History Month UK is an annual event that celebrates the achievements of black Britons and people of colour throughout history.
In order to highlight this history we’ve curated a selection of open educational resources created by our staff and students on Black History in the UK.
Separating Legend from Legacy: Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland
This post is the second written by LLB student Dervla Craig who has worked as our Information and Data Literacy intern this Summer researching and preparing a National Lottery Heritage Fund bid to preserve, and raise public engagement with, the accused witches of Scotland as an important part of Scotland’s heritage. As I sit to […]
SDGs: Stories of impact
Launched during Global Goals Week in September, ‘SDGs: Stories of impact’ is an exploratory publication from University and tells stories of some of the University’s meaningful contributions to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the past five years.
Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia – open for 2025/2026 student participation
Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia The fourth year of the Edinburgh Award for Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia concluded on 31st March 2025. Seven students (and one staff volunteer) completed this extracurricular digital research project amassing both the requisite 55-80 hours of volunteering time AND the significant & demonstrable impact in improving the topic coverage of their […]
Intern Reflection: ‘Words, words, words.’ (Hamlet 2.2.210)
Towards the end of my summer internship I’ve been working with a lot of words. Whether it be process documents, […]
Creating OERs & Canva Gen AI Features
The OER Service has received a few enquiries specifically regarding using the Canva graphic design platform’s new Generative AI features, […]
Preserving Scottish Heritage: The Accused Witches of Scotland
This post was written by LLB student Dervla Craig on her first month as Information and Data Literacy intern this Summer. My name is Dervla and I am going into my second year of the Graduate LLB at the University of Edinburgh. This summer I am doing a 12-week internship with the University’s Information Services […]
Intern Reflection: Getting Started!
Hello! I’m Sanika, and it’s been three weeks since I’ve started on as the Open Textbook Creation Intern at the Information Services Group at the University, working with the Digital Skills, Design and Training section.
In these three weeks, I’ve edited educational resources for primary and secondary school students, formatted a digital handbook, and learnt what all those tiny symbols at the bottom of the page mean about copyright. I’ve been eager to implement the things I know from my previous experiences, and even more excited to discover how much I didn’t know about academic publishing and graphic design.
Open for Good: Strategic support for OER at the University of Edinburgh (UKSG OER online seminar 2025)
Many thanks to Klara Finnimore and Vicky Drew from UKSG for inviting the University of Edinburgh’s OER Service to speak on our experiences of sustainable strategic support for OER at their UKSG OER Online Seminar 2025. Below are the slides and transcript of the presentation.
Creating Edinburgh – Student created interdisciplinary OERs ’24/25
As the ’24/25 academic year comes to a close we review the excellent range of OER created by students across the University. We have four new fabulous resources to share created by undergraduate students as part of the Edinburgh Futures Institute course Creating Edinburgh: The Interdisciplinary City.
OE Week 2025: Wikimedia in the curriculum
As part of our Open Education Week celebrations this year, we’re highlighting the publication of the 2nd Edition of the […]
Copyright and Cartoon Mice – Gen AI Images and the Public Domain
With many image and media applications now integrating AI tools, it’s easier than ever to generate all kinds of eye-catching […]
Costumes and Romance?
I always enjoy a good dig around our digitised collections for different celebrations and days as there’s always something new […]
Wikipedia at 24: Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence
Wikipedia at 24 “With more than 250 million views each day, Wikipedia is an invaluable educational resource”.[1] In light of Wikipedia turning 24 years this week (January 15th), and the Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh turning 9 years old this week too, this post is to examine where we are with Wikipedia today in light […]
Wikimedia in Education 2nd Edition
By Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh. To coincide with Wikipedia’s 24th Birthday, seven new case studies have […]
Sustainable Schools – An IDL STEM design challenge
We’re delighted that our OER “Sustainable Schools – An IDL STEM design challenge” has been chosen this month to feature […]
Draft Dubai Declaration on OER
The 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress took place in Dubai last week. The previous two congresses, held in Paris in […]
Open Education and AI: Proselytisers, prophets and poets.
I’ve been dipping my toes back into the debate about open education and AI over the last few weeks. I stepped back from this space earlier in the year both for personal reasons and because I was getting a bit dispirited by the signal to noise ratio. It’s still a very noisy space, more so […]
Open Access Week 2024: Open Scholarship
Building on last year Open Access Week 2024‘s theme is again focusing on “Community over Commercialisation” and prioritising approaches to […]
Witch Lore and Scottish Castles September Editathon
Witch Lore and Scottish Castles: a Wikipedia Editathon On Friday 27th September we were joined by castle buffs and witchcraft enthusiasts to help us improve the representation of Scottish witchcraft and heritage on Wikipedia. Our Witch Lore and Scottish Castles editathon event saw people coming together in the Digital Scholarship Centre of the Main Library […]
Celtic Knot Wikipedia Language Conference – “Strength in Unity”
“We are not minority languages, we are minoritised. And we are the global majority” – Tura Arutura, Social Justice activist, creative artist and dancer. At the end of September, I had the great good fortune to be invited to the Celtic Knot conference in Waterford, Ireland hosted by Wikimedia Ireland and Wikimedia UK. This conference […]
ISG Student Staff Member of the Year Award
Congratulations to Eden Swimer, winner of the Staff Student Member of the Year Award at the 2024 ISG Staff Recognition Awards. Eden was employed by the OER Service in 2023 to help organise and run our Digital Collection Day as part of the University of…
Their Finest Hour shortlisted for ISG Recognition Awards
We’re delighted that Their Finest Hour has been shortlisted for two ISG Recognition Awards. The project team have been shortlisted for the ISG in the Community Award for outstanding contributions to ISG and commitment to the University’s values. In a…
ALT-C 2024: Speculative Re-imaginings
The last ALT-C I attended was when it was hosted here in at The University of Edinburgh in the impressive […]
The Scottish Independence Referendum 10 years on
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and we’re revisiting these videos from our Towards Scottish […]
Introduction to Archaeology
September is Scottish Archaeology Month, an annual celebration of Scottish heritage, history and archaeology run by Archaeology Scotland as part […]
Scotland loves Monuments 2024
Get involved in Wiki Loves Monuments! Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo competition which takes part throughout the month of September every year, and is supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. You can see historic locations near you that are missing an image using our handy interactive map (red pins are locations without an […]
Explore the Open Media Collection on Media Hopper Create
Earlier this week, the University’s media web portal, Media Hopper Create, launched with a new look design that will bring […]
Medicine Anthropology Theory (MAT) – An Open Access & Open Licensed Journal
Medicine Anthropology Theory is an open-access and open licensed journal publishing scholarly articles, position pieces, reviews, and notes from the field related to the fields of: medical anthropology, the anthropology of biomedicine, critical global health studies, medical humanities, and science and technology studies.
MAT is hosted on the University Library’s Journal Hosting Service and is part of the University’s growing portfolio of fully open-access internationally-leading academic journals.
Eric Liddell – Olympic Medals and Chariots on Fire
Paris Olympics 2024 are underway with the opening ceremony tonight and medal fever starting to ramp up, which makes it an excellent time to look at some 1924 Paris Olympic medals in our own collections.
Our Centre for Research Collections hold Eric Liddell’s 1924 Paris Olympic Medals: Gold Medal for 400m; Bronze Medal for 200m; and the Paris Olympic 2024 Medal for participation. All three were presented to the University by Mrs Patricia Russell, daughter of Eric Liddelll, on Wednesday 20 May 1992.
Bye Argyle House! Final Reflection as an OER Intern
It has been almost ten months since I wrote this blog post when I ended my summer internship as an […]
Goodbye and Thank You to our OER Service Interns
At the end of this month we’re saying goodbye to all four of our fabulous OER Service interns Mayu Ishimoto, […]
Reflections on ‘Their Finest Hour’
In July 2023, I began working on Their Finest Hour, my internship, I was initially told, would last six months. Yet, I am now clocking off, one year later, after continuous exciting and rewarding work on the project. The last year has involved a huge variety of challenges. Organising the collection day itself involved events […]
Recording Everyday Social History – Open Educational Resource
Over the last few months, I have been working on an Open Educational Resource (OER) based on Their Finest Hour and stories and objects collected during the Digital Collection Day in Edinburgh. The OER, Recording Everyday Social History, which is aimed at the second and third levels of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (age range […]
Edinburgh Futures Institute image gallery
To celebrate the opening of the new Edinburgh Futures Institute building last week, the OER Service has shared a gallery […]
Football: More Than A Game
With the UEFA European Football Championship kicking off this week, why not explore the world of football with these open […]
Teaching data literacy with real world (witchy) datasets
Our Digital Humanities award-winning interactive map (witches.is.ed.ac.uk) caught the public’s attention when it launched in September 2019 and has helped to change the way the stories of these women and men were being told with a campaign group, Witches of Scotland, successfully lobbying the Scottish Government into issuing a formal apology from the former First […]
A Whole University Approach to Sustainability
The University’s efforts to fight the climate crisis are incorporated across everything we do, including work to reduce carbon emissions and embed sustainability into research, teaching and governance, operations, and partnerships. This includes the work we do in the OER Service and with our Online Course Production Service colleagues.
Their Finest Hour Archive Launch
On the 6th June, the online archive for Their Finest Hour will be launched, after 73 Digital Collection Day events took place across the UK in 2023 and 2024, including the one that we ran at the University of Edinburgh on 25 November 2023,. Overall, Their Finest Hour digitised over 25,000 previously hidden artefacts from […]
Edinburgh Award 2023/24 Success!
Edinburgh Award 2023/4 Blog This year I had my first experience helping with the Edinburgh Award Wikipedia project. The Edinburgh Award is a scheme which encourages students to volunteer in various projects that are happening around the University whilst undertaking their studies, with the ultimate aim of improving employability and graduate outcomes. Having undertaken an […]
Wikipedia, inclusive practice and improving representation online
Since January 2016, I have worked as Wikimedian in Residence with the University of Edinburgh’s course teams to quickly generate real examples of technology-enhanced learning activities appropriate to the curriculum. As a result, students from diverse learning communities and a variety of disciplines benefit from learning new digital and information literacy skills appropriate for the […]
7 years of Wikipedia and the Translation Studies MSc
A Wikipedia assignment has been part of Translation Studies MSc since 2016 when I first met with Dr. Charlotte Bosseaux and convinced her to try a new approach to a pedagogical problem they had; getting the students to have meaningful, published translation practice that they would be motivated to complete. Course leaders were keen to […]
An OER Intern Going to OER24
Last week, I had the privilege to attend the OER24 conference at Munster Technological University, Cork. As an undergrad student and someone wishing to become an academic someday, joining a conference was thrilling and somewhat terrifying at the same time. However, OER24 was friendly and participatory, exemplified by the finale of the day, the Gasta session with strictly 10-minute informal presentations, agitations, or raising questions, and I was grateful for its welcoming environment.
23 Things for Digital Knowledge: An Intern’s Experience
Paula Gomez Valiente, MSc Language and Intercultural Communication student and 23 Things for Digital Knowledge intern, shares her experience working on the relaunch of the 23 Things for Digital Knowledge course. The new 23 Things course is aimed at students—undergraduate and postgraduate students alike—who would benefit from learning all about the myriad of free resources, software, and apps at their disposal.
OER24: Gathering Courage
Last week the OER24 Conference took place at the Munster Technological University in Cork and I was privileged to go along with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto. The themes of this year’s conference were: Open Education Landscape and Transformation Equity and Inclusion in OER Open Source and Scholarly Engagement Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI […]
OER24 Conference: Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education
This week I’m looking forward to traveling to Cork with OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto for the OER24 Conference. The conference is being hosted by the Munster Institute of Technology this year and chaired by the Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Tom Farrell…
Birds of Midlothian: Open Textbook Interview
In our fifth and final Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interview, Charlie Farley talks to Mayu Ishimoto, an Architectural History and Heritage student who worked as an Open Content Curator intern with the OER Service over the summer of 2023. Mayu now works one day a week as an intern with the OER Service, and published the open textbook Birds of Midlothian as one of her summer projects.
Introduction to Bioimage Analysis: Open Textbook Interview
In the fourth of our Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interviews, Charlie Farley talks to Dr Peter Bankhead, Reader in the Institute of Genetics and Cancer at The University of Edinburgh. Creator of digital imaging open-source software, QuPath, which has been downloaded close to half a million times, cited in about 3,000 academic articles, and is used all over the world, both in academia and industry. Dr Bankhead has published his open textbook Introduction to Bioimage Analysis using GitHub and Jupyter Books.
Fundamentals of Music Theory: Open E-Textbook Interview
In the third of our Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interviews, Charlie Farley talks to Dr Nikki Moran, Senior Lecturer in Music at the ECA. Niki is lead author and presenter of the University of Edinburgh’s Coursera MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Fundamentals of Music Theory, engaging 300000 active learners and recruiting around 500 new students per week. Fundamentals of Music Theory was the first open e-textbook published on Edinburgh Diamond as part of a pilot project in collaboration with the OER Service.
R@R(D)SVS: Open Textbook Interview
In the second of our Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interviews, Charlie Farley talks to Dr Jill Mackay, Senior Lecturer (Veterinary Medical Education) at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. Dr Mackay is a proponent of open science, and particularly exploring how education research can adopt open science practices. She has created and published multiple OER, including the open textbook R@R(D)SVS designed to help staff and students get to grips with with R programming.
Edinburgh Diamond: Open Textbook Interview
To celebrate Open Education Week 2024, Charlie Farley has interviewed staff across the University on their experiences making and using Open Textbooks. In this post, she talks to Rebecca Wojturska about Edinburgh Diamond, the University’s Open Publishing Service.
Open Textbook Interview Series for OE Week 2024
March 4th-8th marks Open Education Week 2024, an annual celebration and opportunity for those working in Open Education to actively share their achievements and learn about what others are achieving worldwide. This year we’re celebrating Open Education Week by publishing a series of interviews with staff and students across the University who have created and published open textbooks. Open textbooks are books that have been made accessible online free of cost and are also openly licensed to allow free modifications, use, and sharing.
Reflections on Burns Night Editathon and My First Experience of Giving Training
This post is written by new Assistant Wikimedian in Residence, Ellie Whitehead. On Burns Night, 25th January, I ran my first Wikipedia Editathon event. The event looked to add more Scottish traditions, information about Robert Burns, and Scottish women in literature onto Wikipedia. Together we made 557 total edits, added 15.5k words, created 7 new […]
Re-use, OER, & 23 Things
The University of Edinburgh’s 23 Things for Digital Knowledge is a self-directed course aimed towards students new to The University of Edinburgh to introduce and refresh the range of digital tools, services, software, support, and knowledge available. What you may not know is that for both iterations of the course, content has been created by re-using open licensed content from the University of Edinburgh and itself is open licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY). In fact we actively encourage you to take our Digital Knowledge course and adapt it for your own purposes.
Upload Stage & WW2 Educational Resource
The upload stage of Edinburgh’s Their Finest Hour project has begun! After collecting over fifty testimonies, and thousands of photographs of WW2-related objects at the collection day, we are now working through the stories and photos, and uploading them to Oxford’s online archive that will launch in June. While we do this, we’re keeping a […]
Creating Edinburgh – New student created interdisciplinary OERs
We’re delighted to share a new collection of open educational resource developed by undergraduate students as part of the Edinburgh […]
Launch of new ’23 Things for Digital Knowledge’ course!
This week we’re launching a new version of the award winning 23 Things for Digital Knowledge course! The new updated […]
Happy 23rd Birthday Wikipedia!
This post is written by new Assistant Wikimedian in Residence, Ellie Whitehead. 23 years ago, on 15th January 2001, Wikipedia was launched as an independent, online open-source encyclopaedia. In its first year it amassed 20, 000 articles appearing in 18 different languages. Since then, Wikipedia has grown to be an internationally known and respected symbol […]
Edinburgh Collection Day
On Saturday 25th November, Edinburgh University student and staff volunteers ran a successful digital archive event on Saturday as part of the University of Oxford’s Their Finest Hour project. Over 100 members of the public came to the event, and volunteers recorded over 50 interviews and took thousands of photographs of items including a […]
Open Education Conference (OpenEd) 2023
The OER Service and Online Course Production Service are delighted to be participating in the 2023 Open Education Conference (OpenEd) […]
