Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world and is an important first stop when looking up any topic – it is truly an incredible resource. But its power can be dangerous. It lacks diversity both in its editorship and its articles. This means that its systemic biases can have a large impact on …
Read moreAs part of my work as a Board member of the Apereo Foundation, we’ve been working on new content to more clearly make the case for adopting open source, particularly in education. Alongside that we’ve been working on developing open source health measu…
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Addressing the challenges of digital and information literacy, digital scholarship and open knowledge at the University of Edinburgh Summary The University of Edinburgh is the first university in the UK to appoint a university-wide Wikimedian in Residence as part of its institutional strategy to develop information and digital literacy skills for staff and students, and …
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We are taking the opportunity of International Women’s Day to rename our Boardroom in Argyle House after Brenda Moon, the first woman to head up a research university library when she was Librarian here at the University of Edinburgh in the 1980s and 90s. Brenda played a major role in bringing the University into the …
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Advice from HR was not to call this job ‘Witchfinder General’. So we didn’t. But we wanted to. University of Edinburgh has a database of Scottish Witches. It has been published as open data and we are looking for a Data and Visualisation Intern to work with our Wikimedian in Residence to help us develop …
Read moreLast week I taught the third run of our Blogging to Build your Professional Profile workshop and also had the pleasure of joining a lunchtime call with colleagues from ALT to talk about different approaches to team blogging. Something that struck me is that whenever I talk about blogging there are a number of issues […]
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Creating new role models on Wikipedia to encourage the next generation of #ImmodestWomen By Siobhan O’Connor, Alice White, Sara Thomas and Ewan McAndrew. Wikipedia, the free, online, multilingual encyclopaedia is building the largest open knowledge resource in human history. Now aged eighteen years old, its English language version receives over 500 million views per month, …
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Wikipedia turns 18 today! Hurray! I hope it doesn’t go out and get completely hammered and wake up in the morning with no memory of how it got home. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Wikimedia UK has asked us all to tell them why we value Wikipedia. What does Wikipedia mean to you? The power […]
Read moreBefore Christmas by lovely former colleague R. John Robertson invited me to answer some questions about digital literacy for a course on Digital Literacy and Life that he’s teaching with Cindy Strong at Seattle Pacific University. I’m late with these responses as usual, but it was a really interesting and thought provoking exercise because I’ve never […]
Read moreA couple of weeks ago I gave a webinar as part of Jane Secker’s new online course on Digital Literacies and Open Practice at City, University of London. The lecture was called Open for all? Engaging with open education practice at the personal and institutional level and the recording is available here (Adobe Connect). The webinar provided an […]
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