Blog Posts

Clouds

Useless Interns and the Fragile Internet

The Open.Ed site has over 500 OER posts and about an equal number of blog posts, and I’ve been going through them manually in an audit, which has been time-consuming and repetitive. 
When I’ve been asked about my job, many people have wondered why the whole process isn’t just automated. I’ve had a lot of questions on why I didn’t just use AI or code to scrape all of the data from WordPress and have believed that I had one of those ‘vanity internships’, where I get an experience for my LinkedIn but offer no real benefit for the company. 
There are two very good reasons for this; copyright and the fragility of digital information. 

Lake by the Pentlands

Intern Reflection: Guess who’s back (back again)?

I’m Sanika, and last year I was the Open Textbook Creation Intern for seven months working on Open Educational Resources and process documents for the new textbook service. I am back for the summer and this year I’ve gone technical with it, and as the OER Web Migration intern, I’ve thrown myself into the complex technological programming code world of… Microsoft Excel. I may be working for an IT company but at my heart I am a word person, and Excel allows me to excel at collating words in a giant web audit.

Edinburgh old town landscape as seen from Princes Street Gardens.

My first week as an Open Educational Resources Intern

Hello! I’m Charlotte, this year’s Open Educational Resources (OER) summer intern within the University’s Information Services Group. My first week of this internship has thus far been largely characterised by extensive reading – which, as a French and English Literature student, I assure you that I am quite accustomed to! In perusing both the OER service’s digital catalogue of published resources (on Open.Ed, TES Resources and Edinburgh Diamond, to name a few) and the vast array of online open access textbooks similarly published by other institutions, in such a brief span of time I feel I have already become thoroughly familiar with the department’s operations and its fundamental values, namely of providing widespread, barrier-free access to teaching and research materials of high quality.

illustration of earth from space with science satellites.

SatSchool: Earth Observation educational resources designed and delivered by PhD students

As part of our Open Education Week activities, Charlie caught up with Leam Howe, about the SatSchool Earth Observation outreach programme. Leam is one of the University of Edinburgh PhD Researchers involved in running the SatSchool programme.  SatSchool create educational resources and take them out to schools in order as part of education outreach on worldwide geography, ecosystems, climate and the impacts of human activity through satellite observation, and using materials created by current researchers.

Happy 25th birthday Wikipedia!

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 […]

Image of houses in Strasbourg on the side of a canal

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.

Sustainable development goals: stories of impact

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 […]

Victora Street in Edinburgh in the morning, before most shops opened.

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. 

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

MAT Medicine Anthropology Theory

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 crossing the finishing line

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.

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 […]

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 […]

A part of an inner courtyard surrounded by a red brick building

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 […]

bird silhouettes showing relative size to each other

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.