(Shani) Good morning, everyone,
and welcome to the Wikidata and Education panel.
We're just happy anyone is here because there are four amazing sessions
happening all at the same time so thank you for showing up.
- (audience 1) We're happy you're here. - (Shani) Yes, we are also happy and we--
Yes, yes, yes.
I mean, really all the sessions are really good
so this is for the people at home, if you're watching something else,
please come watch us later or vice versa because there's a lot of awesomeness
in this conference.
So good morning again and just to be clear
on what to expect from this session, we're going to have
a really quick introduction of these amazing people
that are assembled here today.
We're going to do an introduction of around three minutes each,
and then we're simply going to have a chat.
We're going to discuss education and Wikidata
and what could be done together and hopefully we can then
open the floor to questions but do feel free to basically interrupt us
if you have something burning and you really want to know
the answer to.
So without further ado,
let's meet our panelists.
And the first is João.
(João) So, hi, everyone.
Is it working?
Yup, okay, so my name is João Peschanski, username Joaolpe.
I'm a member of the user group, Wiki Movimento Brasil
and the user group, Wikipedia and Education.
And I'm a university professor,
particularly in the Department of Social Communications
where I teach Computational Journalism Media studies.
- And I have two slides, I'm not sure-- - (Shani) Tell me when to switch.
Okay, yeah, you can switch.
So I will just mention two projects that to some extent,
give a background of what I'm-- what my understanding of the connection
of Wikidata and educations are.
So the first project is the idea
of using Wikidata as an instrument for Wikipedia, both and mostly to create
more meaningfulness and efficiency in the process of working with my students
so this was a project done twice.
In which my students created true structure narratives
based on Wikidata, entries for Wikipedia in Portuguese on elections.
There were around 400 entries created and the idea is to have my students
not feel the idea that editing Wikipedia,
particularly tables, is boring.
So it provides a gigantic structured draft based on Wikidata.
So it provides more efficiency and effectiveness for the students.
If you could go to the second one.
And we can talk later if you're interested I provide a lot of links.
And so the second case is one that I'm running right now.
So in Brazil, there were four distinct investigations
of human rights crimes committed during the military dictatorship,
two by the government, one by intellectuals,
one by family members of killed and disappeared people in Brazil.
And as they were completely autonomous
and diverse, data that they collected was conflicting.
So we are using Wikidata as a way of dealing
with conflicted information, disagreeing data, knowledge diversity.
And having my students work as curators of the information,
in which we don't impose one over the other but we try to understand
the context and methodology of the information that was created
and there is, of course, actual results
and there is a dashboard you can check,
but I would just point on this one, a recent Wikidata live training
that we had with Denny Vrandecic on disagreeing data
and knowledge diversity that has actually informed the way
we are working the methodology around this particular project.
- And I thank you. - (Shani) Thank you so much.
Next is Ewan.
(Ewan) Yes, so, hi, my name is Ewan.
I work as the Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.
It's a partnership between Wikimedia UK
and the University of Edinburgh looking at ways
in which we can benefit from and contribute to the Wikimedia projects.
We're working with about ten different course programs at the moment.
And we're on the verge of publishing our first booklet of case studies
of how Wikimedia is being used in education in the U.K.
In particular, we've been working with Data Science for Design Masters students
for about three years now.
And the course leaders on that course approached myself
after me and Navina Evans, who's behind Histropedia, around a workshop
at Repository Fringe conference focused on Wikidata,
and they were really interested in teaching data science
through working with real world data sets.
And so what they do is they host a data fair
every year in October where people from around Edinburgh,
around Scotland, different institutions come and pitch a data set
to the students on the Masters program there
to work with intensively over a seven-week period.
It's a three minute sort of speed dating exercise
where a data set is pitched and the students organize themselves
into groups of three and they then...
analyze the data set, work with it and they want to tell engaging visual--
visualizations with those data sets.
So of the 15 data sets that were pitched by places
like The National Library of Scotland, National Records of Scotland,
I pitched this data set which is The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database
which is one of the University of Edinburgh's own
and it was in a Microsoft access database.
And it basically has all the records of witch trials in Scotland
from 1563 to 1736, stored in a static access database
and we just pitched to the students what could they do
if they turn that into linked open data.
And we did that over two years and that leveraged some money
to hire a Women in STEM student,
become an intern for three months and she had a background in GIS.
So we asked her to look at all the place names mentioned
in the data set so that she could then plot all of these witch trials,
all of these accused witches on a map which now exists on this website
which was live as of a month ago.
And we're now pitching to the students
a further project of now that the information is on Wikidata,
can we do some network analysis of seeing who the main influencers were
and link it up that much better and have a really rich understanding
of this period of history.
Okay, that's me.
(Shani) And next-- Thank you so much, Ewan.
- Next is Debora. - (Debora) Hi, thank you.
Thank you, guys all for being here.
I have been a Wikipedia author for forever
and I'm a professor for Computer Science here in Berlin
at a local engineering college.
I've been teaching a course called Semantic Modeling since about ten years.
And in the past three recent years, I've started using Wikidata
as one of the examples for what we're actually doing.
Do you want to go onto the next one, please, Shani, thank you.
What we're doing is this project called, University Degrees.
Now the students start off with the background
that they've learned all the traditional stuff
about RDF and OWL and using Protege and it hurts and it's stupid
and I hate this.
So after we've been through the fire of that,
then we graduate to Wikidata.
And we decided to model this microscopic part of the universe
called University Degrees because we're a university
and we know all about university degrees.
And because there is a database available in Germany called Anabin
that has all of the data, theoretically, in it on degrees that are granted.
I use it as a member of the admissions committee
for our Masters program to see if a Bachelors degree program
is accredited or not.
And so the idea was,
"Well, we'll just dump Anabin into Wikidata."
Then we learned that reality is much, much worse than this actually is.
So what they end up doing is choosing a country,
they researched the university structure there,
usually just pick one or two universities and then try to model the degrees
that are granted.
We got a property accepted called Grants
that a university grants this degree and the idea is we can see
what degrees are granted by a university and when we go to a person
that we can model which degree they actually have.
Now we've ended up with a lot of problems and I have some modeling problems
I can't model in Wikidata.
If anybody have some great ideas, I'd love to talk to you about it
because we have the issue of double degrees
and double majors.
And there's all sorts of monsters running around Wikidata called
things like Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery.
And I just can't imagine putting together all the possible combinations
of double degrees into Wikidata, that would just kill me.
There are also degrees that have more than one
participating university.
We found one that has five participating universities
for the first year and three different ones
for the second year.
And then there's the question of Honors degrees
which is different in all different countries
and so it turns out to have lots of wonderful modeling issues
that I have no idea how we're going to go on with this.
And the next slide.
The last one just to give you an idea, we collect stuff.
So in our Wiki project, we have a table and you're welcome to--
if you find something weird, to put it in there.
We have all these Bachelors degrees that we found floating around Wikidata,
Masters degrees, there's this wonderful one over here
under *Other*, a Masters degree in Icelandic Medieval Studies.
I think the five people who've graduated from that
- are probably all on Wikidata, right? - (laughter)
So anyway, my interest is from more of a Computer Science point of view,
what is an ontology, what is classification systems,
how do we go about doing this?
And we thought university degrees would be easy and they're not.
(Shani) Thank you so much, Debora.
And next is Akbar Ali.
(Akbar) Thank you, Shani
My name is Akbar Ali from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
I'm working as a Social Science teacher in a United Arab Emirates school.
Since 2015, I use Wikidata and try to introduce Wikidata
in the school basic level education, especially in high school standard
as part of that.
Yeah, we introduced Wikidata among these high school students,
especially to collect data at first, especially personal data
of the great personalities.
And we [carry out] assignments to students to collect the data
from the Wikidata, that was the [inaudible] direction part.
And then same [inaudible] we did Wikidata info books.
Students prepare info books by modeling Wikidata
that was developed [inaudible].
Then the extra activity was we had the students
from different countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and European countries also.
And a lot of students are from different languages,
so we conducted the translation of labels and the descriptions.
And from the classroom itself we're using the device students edited
some descriptions and labels.
At the same time, we had four classrooms around 28 students
were in each classroom, so totally we had 112 participation
from four classes.
And we also encountered a teacher training program
for teachers who were trying to introduce Wikidata
into their subject.
At the same time, we have some challenges
And many students do not have the devices
that we are going to tackle my next academic year
by using a lot of devices.
And the internet connectivity is another issue,
some of the students or sometimes we feel the lack of internet connectivity,
and that is especially when we try these activities in the [inaudible]
so there's internet connectivity issues [inaudible].
And actually Wikidata or Wikipedia, it's just not the part of a curriculum
but next academic year we are trying to introduce,
as a curriculum tool, Wikidata.
That is one of the future plans and we also would like to teach
the students some of the basic SPARQL query.
And same [inaudible] we also try to form the Wiki clubs
in schools, that is one of our future plans.
Yeah, that's it.
(Shani) Thank you so much.
And lastly, we also need to meet me, kind of.
So hi, everyone, I'm Shani Evenstein.
I'm from Israel, I work at the Tel Aviv University,
I'm an educator and a researcher, actually my PhD is about Wikidata,
specifically as a learning platform.
I've been an open knowledge advocate for a long time now
and just recently became part of the Board of Trustees.
The only reason I have to mention it
is just to say that everything I say here
is not in my hat as a trustee or a representation of the WMF,
but rather of me as a volunteer and an educator and a researcher.
And I want to tell you a bit about my experience.
So I've been teaching Wikidata,
I would say since--
2014 would be the first year that I started to introduce it
to my courses.
But I would--before delving into my courses,
I would say that there are two major models
of incorporating Wikidata into the academic curriculum
or the educational curriculum.
One is an alternative assessment.
That is when different lecturers decide
to give their students an assignment
on Wikidata, using Wikidata-- previously it was Wikipedia, right?
Like everything we now experience with Wikidata is like what we had
about ten years ago with Wikipedia.
So we're going through, in a way, the same process now
of introducing Wikidata as a learning platform
to the educational world in a way.
And just like with Wikipedia, there are two models
that are maybe more but two major ones that I could at least recognize
and I work with both.
So the first is instead of the students being tested or writing a paper,
they do something on Wikipedia or Wikidata,
that's the first model.
And in that sense, I've been supporting a variety of lecturers
around Israel in various universities around Israel,
starting in 2017.
So it took some time, right.
It's almost five years since Wikidata was formed for academia
to start actually engaging with it.
In Israel, at least.
In academic courses, as an assignment or as something that we--
We've actually mentioned it a bit before in courses.
about not really having the students write anything, right.
And the first ones to interact were people from Computer Sciences,
from Digital Humanities, that sort of fields
because it was a natural way of giving the students a project
that they can actually apply that is related to what they study.
This coming semester, I'm going to support two such activities,
one in an international digital culture studies,
in a digital discourse course.
And we're going to have a Wikidata workshop
and that's going to be part of the students' assessment.
And also something that I'm actually very much excited about,
at the Bar Ilan University Computer Science Department
on a course on Semantic Web.
They have--and that is going to be in collaboration
with the Israel Antiquities Authority.
And the thing is, the lecturer that teaches this course
wanted the students to have a project that actually means something.
So she thought Wikidata would be a good option.
So this is what we're-- this is going to be how we start, right.
On the right, these are the cards that we get from
the Israel Antiquities Services.
These are Word files, by the way, Word files, okay.
Nothing is--Word files, I'll say it again.
Nothing is digitized.
And what we want to do is have the students
work on these, model these.
Now because it's a Semantic Web course,
they have been grappling with how to model things
and they've been using what Debora has been doing basically
using Protege and using OWL and using very basic RDF
way of thought in terms of doing it.
And the trick is going to be how we can then take it
and map it into Wikidata which is a real live--
with a flexible ontology kind of project.
So that's coming up this semester.
And I would say the second model is one where Wikidata assignments
is the main assessment.
That is happening, as far as I know, today only with my courses
at Tel Aviv University.
But as some of you know, I have opened elective courses
at Tel Aviv University where my students basically
contribute to Wikipedia.
The first course was in 2013 and then a second course opened in 2015
for the whole campus, so basically every undergraduate student
at Tel Aviv University can take such a course.
And why I'm mentioning it is because last year
I completely transformed a curriculum of that course
to basically feature Wikidata in an academic course
for the first time.
And this is a course called from Web 2 to Web 3,
from Wikipedia to Wikidata.
And these are my--this is the first class
that graduated from that course.
And in this course, of course Wikidata was--the assignment
was the main thing.
Like using Wikidata and learning about Wikidata
was the main thing of the course.
It's not just an assignment in a course that deals with something else.
So these are the two different models, this is what I've been doing,
and now that you know all of us, I'm hoping that you can see
only from the introduction how, in a way, diverse it is.
How you can do it in very different ways--
there's just not just one way of doing it or dealing with it.
But there are some things that I think are in common
to all of us and some specific, I would say, challenges
or issues that we all deal with.
So I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion
with the panelists now and see how they have come to be
in a place where they even incorporate Wikidata into the curriculum
because that's not happening out of the blue, right.
We have to actually work for it to happen.
And there has been work being done for years and years,
for me to open that course, for instance.
I had to--it started with one session in a course
and then a year later, two sessions and three sessions,
and I wasn't satisfied and I wanted more and more and more
until I was able to convince the university to actually do it.
But I'm quite sure that all of these panelists
have their own challenges in terms of persuading
the academic institutions where they're at to actually even go for it.
So I would be very happy to start the discussion
by asking you what did you have to do
to persuade your institutions to even do it?
Let's see.
Yeah, so, I mean our institution was hosting me to work
with course leaders and they were very much...
mindful that the bread and butter of what I was doing should really be
within curriculum work.
And we had a course that was Data Science for Design,
and I just happened to be running a workshop
where one of the course leaders was attending.
And it percolated, struck, and he was looking for people
to pitch data sets, and Wikidata was an interesting data set
for him to model.
He was actually interested
in me pitching the idea of Wikimedia's data on harassment
to the students--he was looking-- but I looked into that a bit
and we thought maybe we could do something with
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft data and we approached the court,
the people behind that database and said could we release this
as open linked open data and see what the students
could do with it.
Because they were trying to let the websites survive
and the data survive because it's not really been used since 2003.
They were quite interested
- (Shani) Could be done. - in what new insights could be done.
So it was pushing against an open door, really
in that particular way but there was a lot of work
that went behind that,
- the years to persuade, I would say. - (Shani) Yeah.
(Shani) But in any case, it sounds like you're one of the lucky ones, right.
You're a Wikimedian in Residence at a university--woohoo!
We have to say something about that in itself
because I think the fact that academic institutions
are now starting to realize that they even need this position,
- is something kind of new and you're-- - Yeah.
(Shani) You're a pioneer in that sense and we have a bunch of others
now joining you around the world.
But it's quite amazing.
Yes, Andy's in the audience as well.
So I hope he's feeling better actually, but yeah, he's at Coventry University
and a Wikimedian in Residence there.
- So we'd like more. - (Shani) Yes.
Martin Poulter at Oxford University was kind of the inspiration
for my own residency because he was doing editathons
at the Bodleian Library on the Great War
and Ada Lovelace Day
and our director of IT, Melissa Highton was looking at what the work
- he was doing at Oxford and thinking-- - (Shani) She was inspired.
Could it be applied in teaching and learning?
Did it have to be libraries only?
Or did information literacy, digital skills,
how under representations of knowledge, did that have applications
in teaching and learning and that's kind of--
So she ran an editathon in Edinburgh on the Edinburgh Seven,
the first female undergraduates in Britain who didn't have Wikipedia pages
at the time.
And she invited Professor Allison Littlejohn,
who's now Dean of Teaching and Learning at University of Glasgow
to come and do some research to make sure it wasn't just a gimmick,
that it was actual genuine teaching and learning going on
in these editing environments.
And she's produced about five or six research papers that says
there is an actual point to doing this in education.
(Shani) Yeah and I think you're making an important point
about how we also need academic research,
showing that this is valuable, right.
And currently, we have zero.
I mean besides my research that I'm working on now
and will take some time to publish, there is zero,
zero research about education and Wikidata.
We have tons of research about Wikidata
but not about how it could be used as an educational platform
in that sense.
You've mentioned literacies and we actually have a bunch of--
quite a lot of academic research about how to utilize Wikipedia,
in that sense and how it helps to enhance all sorts of literacies, right,
digital skills, academic skills, critical thinking, collaborative work,
all of that.
And I think Wikidata is taking it one step further
and we can use it to teach people data literacy.
But we have zero research to support that and therefore it's--
we are just at a beginning stage in that sense.
- Yeah. - (Shani) And so, yeah,
(Shani) And so what you're saying just supports that.
Yeah, we're a research-based institution so we have to set an evidence
what we're doing and there is worthwhile academic purpose.
So yeah, we've got these research papers on Wikipedia editing.
But yeah, more on WIkidata would definitely help
- make the case further. - (Shani) Yeah.
(Shani) Debora, what about you?
- (Debora) Well, I'm lucky too - (Shani) Yes, yes, you are.
because I'm a German professor and that means all I have is a heading.
- (Shani) You can do whatever you want. - And I can choose what I want to teach.
And I put the heading in the curriculum anyway
because I designed the curriculum so that makes it a lot easier.
I was very lucky that I had two really great students
who had been working here at the Wikimedia Foundation,
the German Wikimedia Foundation as student programmers,
Lucy and Charlie.
And they both did their Bachelors thesis on Wikidata.
And I mean you may have heard of Lucy's-- that's the article placeholder.
That was her Bachelors thesis.
And so it was clear that
if it's easy enough for some brilliant Bachelors to do,
my Masters had better be able to do it as well.
And so that's when I started working our way into that.
And the students really enjoyed doing something real.
And not just something that's get a grade and then it's gone.
They found this was it, it's scary too.
Because you make a change and then some editor comes along
and screams at you because you made a stupid mistake.
But it's okay.
It's a Wiki, we can turn it back and start over again.
(Shani) Yeah, João, what about you?
Okay, so I guess my use of Wikidata is dependent on my use of Wikipedia
as an educator.
So I started doing Wiki assignments in 2014 when I was just hired
as a university professor and that was challenging
because my school didn't really understand,
had never done it.
So I didn't really know what to expect, if it was going to work out.
I actually was not a Wikimedian at the time.
I just read a book--I had a grad student
and then I said okay, that might be cool.
It was my time so I work.
The university where I work, they required that I did
the Wikipedia assignment
as well as the expected evaluation
of my seminar.
So it was basically double grading.
And I had at the time 175 students.
It was really hard but then to some extent they've seen they couldn't change me
so they had to adapt.
And now I transition to Wikidata, it was easier, I guess.
Because now I'm a little bit more senior and they let me do whatever I want
just like what you were saying and just okay, they don't even ask anymore
what I'm doing.
And I think the whole use
of Wikipedia and Wikidata now for me
is just-- there are problems that need to be solved
in knowledge building.
Sometimes you need Wikipedia, sometimes you need Wikidata,
sometimes you need Wikivoyage, Wikimedia Commons.
So we just started our project, for instance,
on structured data on Commons.
We've uploaded from a GLAM project a thousand files coming from
the military dictatorship, no one knows anything about them.
And we are working with my students to identify, to depict anything we can
on the pictures with the expectation that if we identify there are 17 stairs
on the building which the students were protesting the government,
we can identify the building.
So I think you go with a purpose.
That's the whole thing of what we are doing in general.
It has value, it's meaningful.
And if you're able to convey that to the students
and then broaden and deepen the experience of meaningfulness
that they can acquire from data literacy or media training,
or I don't know, history understanding political values, democracy,
whatever you're working on as a professor,
then you've reached the purpose.
I think it's just for me it's a resource, and it's a marvelous resource,
and I'm glad I'm part of this community because it helps building this resource.
(Shani) So basically you either have to become a Wikimedian in Residence
or become a university professor to be able to do whatever you want.
But not everyone is in that position and I think Akbar Ali
is representing another view of that which is also important
and in a way, me as well.
I mean having one step at the door is making it easier to implement changes
once you're already in.
But making that first step to convince the institution
that it's even worthwhile is very difficult.
It's very challenging.
And so I want to kind of move between this question and the next one
and start talking about some of the challenges
that we're all facing doing this work.
So I think you're the perfect person to start with that
because you've already mentioned a bit of the challenges
but maybe you can explain some more.
Okay.
Actually there was always a question
what would be the new innovative teaching method.
That was the question realized in the teachers' community in the UAE.
So I thought to share about the Wikidata at first,
that will be new for them.
So I was part of the collection-- as part of the doing assignment
[inaudible] usually the students use
Google or something, other websites like Wikipedia.
But Wikidata was a new thing for them.
So first of all, we started by collecting the information from Wikidata.
We framed the template in the paper, [inaudible] Wikidata template.
So it was a good thing for understanding the structure of Wikidata for students.
And we started to collect information.
But there was one problem that when we do the content-wise,
like when we add a content into Wikidata,
students did not create a user [inaudible]
especially they need email ID.
So actually they are high school students
so most of them had no email ID, so what we have them then
by using Google Spreadsheet the data which we created
that we move to Google Spreadsheet, then myself, I was adding
all this data into Wikidata by using quick statements.
Actually that is one of the challenge we need to give a chance for students
to create their own ID especially if they are high school level students,
so they need email procedures that is also still challenges there.
If we are overcome, if the parents are permitting that,
we can create hundreds of students a user ID and their contribution
will be there.
That is one of the challenges.
The second thing, I was the head of the Department of Social Science
so I could integrate Wikidata as part of our curriculum adaptation plan.
But at the same time, how to run these Wikidata projects
and all other subjects, we need to get the support
of especially the school full team.
So I think we need to give much training and awareness
to the teachers, one of the uses of Wikidata, how can we integrate Wikidata
as an educational tool in the curriculum.
Surely, if the teachers are convinced and if they agree to that,
I think we can solve those problems too.
You said there are two problems, from teacher's side
or from student's side.
(Shani) Yeah, I think you're making a really important point
about creating awareness, right.
- Yes. - (Shani) And I think Ewan also talked
about that.
Sometimes it's as simple as someone sitting at the right place
at the right time at a lecture that you're giving someplace,
and it sparks something in their mind and they kind of get it.
And then you can expand from there.
But without that legwork the grassroots work
that we've all been doing, it would be impossible
to get to a residency position or to have university professors
decide to incorporate it into their curriculum
because it's a lot of work.
It takes work.
Even doing it just with Wikipedia takes work as we all know.
And so yeah, that's an important step,
in a way, in creating this atmosphere
or this eco-system where this is a thing that we do in higher education.
And we're basically, as we said, at the very beginning stages
of disseminating the idea even that this is possible,
that this needs to happen, that this has to happen
because that's the only good tool that we have today
to basically teach the students data literacy.
So I want to hear, Debora, a bit more about your challenges
in your courses because, obviously, starting is not the issue here
but you have some other challenges.
Right, we have other challenges in the sense that we're interacting
with the Wikidata community in a weird time fashion.
It's all compressed into this semester, and it's the second half of the semester.
So when we want things changed, we want them changed fast.
Getting the property of grants put through took--
it didn't come through until like a week
before the semester was over.
Luckily, everybody had their quick statement sheets all ready to go.
We just put the number in, pushed a button
and did a lot of edits.
And then we were dead for half a year because I only teach this class
in the summer.
So we have another one that we had proposed this summer,
the double degree one because there are so many
people who have double degrees and we weren't sure
how to model it anyway but we proposed this property
and now it's marked as, "This seems to be dead
because nobody's interested in it anymore."
Well, we're interested but we're not interested
until next summer again.
So we don't have this continuous interaction with the community.
- But it comes in fits and starts. - (Shani) Yeah.
(Shani) So in a way, what you're saying is
just stressing the importance of being in close relationship
with the Wikidata community and that is true, I would say,
to incorporating any Wiki project into the curriculum.
You have to have the support of the community.
If the community is not behind you, in a way, it could become messy.
So that's a good takeaway, I would say in general.
João, what about some of your challenges?
Okay, so with Wikidata particularly,
I think one challenge that relates
what you're saying about the lack of academic research,
it's also the lack of resources that we can use for students.
So I think we've created for one of the projects
that I was just shown, you have to have [Giovanna]
[inaudible] are here at the conference as well--Giovanna's here...
So she was my student, so--
they were all my students.
There is a process of multiplication to some extent with
what we are doing.
But we needed resources.
And so students could actually rely on to edit Wikidata and understand
what they need to do and to work on structured data on Commons.
This was a challenge.
So we had to put time on that.
I think that was a major challenge and another challenge that I see
which is again, always worrisome is that my students
assess Wikidata assignments as boring,
which for me is really tough to digest.
They love doing Wikipedia now.
But Wikidata is just filling out a form for them.
And I think that something that we need to improve
if we want to use it as an educational resource
because they are willing to do it, they see the purpose,
it's just the actual operation is boring.
And I think that's something that we need to improve design
for education as an open education resource.
(Shani) Yeah, I'm going to use what you're saying--
(audience 2) You need to see the magic.
You need to introduce the magic of SPARQL queries
and all those kind of models into your students.
That's why I have a feeling that
because in Kerala last year we tried conducting
a series of workshops for engineering college students
as a part of my user group activity.
Nearly 12 engineering colleges, we've gone to all the colleges
and done Wikidata workshops with hands-on editing.
And yeah, it's boring, initially it's boring,
it's filling up a form for students.
But we switch to SPARQL queries and we are showing
this kind of linked data models and all the maps and all those stuffs,
yeah, then the scenario changes, it's super interesting.
It suddenly becomes a big thing for the Computer Science students.
And also yeah, we had some partnership
with the language departments
in some universities.
This year, I am going to talk about Lexemes, Lexeme projects,
so that language departments
can model that language
and add a lot of data so--
Yeah, that's it, you can make it interesting.
There's a lot of ways out there in Wikidata, I think.
(Shani) Yeah, thank you for adding from your experience.
I want to go back to what João was saying.
João was making two important points, I think.
One is about awareness that we're still lacking
and the fact that we don't have enough resources yet
to use it well in an educational setting and since we're--
Maybe it's a good time to open a parenthesis and say,
"We are just five examples from around the world."
Obviously there are a lot of other people doing amazing work
in other places in the world in other academic institutions
or educational settings and we've already acknowledged
some of them.
I encourage you to also speak to Matthew,
to Jason Evans, who's here.
To Will Kent, can you say hi.
And I specifically want to acknowledge Will, who's here
because Will is part of Wiki Ed Foundation.
They are the education program for the U.S. and Canada
and what they've done, they've waited for some time
but when they do things, they do it right.
And they created an online training for Wikidata
which is now an online module that all of us can use.
So they're helping to create resources in that sense
that other people can use, I also want to acknowledge
[inaudible] who's sitting here, who has been a guest lecturer
at a variety of institutions around the world,
helping to eventualize, in a sense, for Wikidata and without resources
such as his introduction to Wikidata, it would have been more difficult
to disseminate.
So this is just to stress that we as a community
are at the very beginning stages of creating actual resources
that will help other educators do this kind of work.
That's one challenge, resources,
and I want to go back to assignments also.
João mentioned that for him creating the right assignment
is a challenge.
And I would concur.
I agreed completely.
It has been my challenge as well, both as an alternative assessment
and both in the model of the whole university course
to make sure that I have assignments that are the right size,
the right scope
and are understandable to the students and also interesting enough
for them to actually want to engage.
And also that it's clear how I assess their progress.
So in a way, a bit of what happened to me using Wikipedia in the classroom
is now happening with Wikidata.
I was very ambitious at the beginning.
Even when I was coming to support someone else's course
and I would do two sessions,
let's say, of an an intro and then a workshop about Wikipedia.
And I would strive for the students to write full articles
or to expand or do something really meaningful.
As I did it more and more throughout the years,
I found myself shrinking the size of the assignments
and creating like mini assignments or--
Today we'd like to talk about mini contributions, right,
so finding cool and interesting ways for the students to contribute something
but that it's not too much is important.
And just the way I went and shrunk
over the years the Wikipedia assignments, I find that it's really important
to do the same with Wikidata.
So giving the students something on the one hand meaningful,
and on the other hand with clear boundaries
that I could--like very clear steps of what they need to do,
how they can engage but still making it interesting enough
has been a challenge in my courses and it's still a work in progress.
I keep experimenting.
And I think that's the most important thing
that we're all experimenting with this platform
and trying to look for new ways to incorporate it
into the academic curriculum because we understand it's important.
But I would totally agree that it's like you said,
you need to create that awareness, and in that sense,
I want to ask the panelists what have worked for you?
Like what helped you do the work that you do?
So Debora, you first.
One of the important things that I find that helped me do the work
is making sure that we document everything on Wiki.
That we don't have thousands of little documents flying
all over the place.
But that we have our discussions on Wiki.
That we have our project page on Wiki.
That the students hand in their reports on Wiki
so that the next group can look back and see what the others did,
what helped them, what didn't help them and that helps the next group
start at a higher level than the group before.
(Shani) That is certainly one approach to keep everything in one place.
I would just suggest from my experience in knowing the work that
others are doing that some educators choose
- to use social media - No.
(Shani) as another means. (chuckles)
No, stay on Wiki.
I'm actually forbidden from using Facebook
in instruction at my university.
So I would not be able to use it.
I heard there must be some Facebook group or something, that's no go.
It has to be on Wiki so that's why I would plead for everyone else
to be keeping their work open and on Wiki.
(Shani) Yeah and that's the beauty of the Wikimedia movement,
there's always diversity and once you hear someone arguing
so passionately about no use of-- only Wiki, you will find
other people as passionate, saying that the use of social media
is the best thing that could have happened because it's helping them
engage with students in their own platforms
in the way that is easy for them.
Wiki is notoriously known to not being as friendly or the user interface
is somewhat lacking.
Yeah, but in Germany, Facebook is only used by old people.
The students are on Instagram.
(Shani) It doesn't have to be Facebook but you get the idea.
Ewan, what about you, what has worked for you?
Well, the sort of nature of the challenge has changed each year.
So initially, it was about how could we get the good information
of access database and then model it on Wikidata.
So it was all about that initial exchange in the first year
so there was no sort of PDF handouts available to do that.
And then the next year it was about how can we then enrich the data,
working with Google Spreadsheets and the Wikidata plug-in
and things like that.
But and then the final year was working with open refine
and so like trying to get our heads around that
about linking their data, adding geographical data,
then putting it on a website.
So again, it was like each year it was different.
So it was all--always it was getting
what stories and engaging tales
could be told once we had all that data in and we had the visualizations.
So the students were always motivated when they had that carrot.
They weren't always really happy with the manual labour aspect
to do this, especially when you have to get 50 edits on Wikidata
to be able to do bulk uploading in the first place.
That was a challenge.
But the main thing that helped was having the Wikidata community primed
that we were going to do this.
And the fact that I had knowledgeable people around me
that I said, "Could you be available so that if we ever have questions--"
like Navina Evans and Martin Poulter
and Jason Evans as well,
and Simon Cobb, we just made sure that we had good people around us
who knew the things that we needed to know
when we needed to know them.
But I agree, documentation is super important,
but there's a number of learning hurdles that we were trying to come up against
- in a very tight window. - (Shani) Yeah.
(Shani) Yeah and the fact that the tools continue to grow
and you have to know everything and you have to--
like there is so much to learn all the time.
You have to really keep yourself
focused on that, otherwise, you'd be doing maybe manual work
that there is now a tool that you don't know about
that is doing it in a much easier way.
So connecting, again, to the community is important.
Do you have final words on what worked for you
because we have to wrap up very soon.
(João) Okay, I guess an important aspect of the way I've also worked
on the education program is to connect it to a larger ecology
within the community, within the tech development aspect
of our community trainings through Wikidata labs,
it's part of something.
So we have Wikimedians in Residence, we have the actual community engaging,
coming for workshops, we set up an agenda for Wikidata live
that can actually contribute to developing the progress
that we want to reach, we developed tools,
we do research.
So it's enriching to some extent
or it's providing a dense experience
for the growth of the community.
It's a slow process.
It's something that needs to be engaged, rethink, rethought,
that's why this kind of conference is so important.
We need to be in touch.
There is no right way to basic experimenting.
No one really knows the best way how it should be done
because no one has actually done it before.
So we are all experimenting and I was--just a something
since I have the mic now-- I was thinking about what Akbar Ali said.
The first time that I used Wikipedia with high school students,
it was a complete failure.
I had been very successful with Wikipedia assignments
with university students.
It's just with high school, they just didn't get it
at the level that we all thought we should lead
because it was just too hard in the process of the critical process.
But then I think Wikidata is actually a good resource
for high school students.
So I think that opened-- an eye-opening, in your presentation, I think
I should go back to this experience.
(Shani) So I want to conclude the panel by saying first of all,
thank you so much to all the panelists and not only to them
but also to the greater, the bigger community
of Wikimedians working in education
to help evangelize and do this work.
And I want to conclude saying or reminding rather to us,
to our community that this is the second Wikidata conference.
In the first Wikidata conference, we also had an education panel.
It was the only education session in the conference.
And two years have passed, so much have been done,
so many cool experimenting but we still have only one panel
in this conference for education.
This is not a criticism but rather for me an eye-opening moment
to realize that we are still at the very beginning stages
of showing our impact and why this is important
to the bigger Wikimedia community and I look at every--
each and every one of you sitting here and listening at home
as people who can now go and do it yourselves
and experimenting and connecting with the community,
talking about the challenges sharing best practices,
sharing resources is basically the way to go
so go experiment.
Wikidata is amazing.
It's such a unique tool to teach all sorts of things, right
from data completion to showing, to being able to show
the gender gap and knowledge gaps in general
in a visualized and cool way.
It is an educational tool.
So use it and hopefully by the next Wiki Data Con,
we're going to see a bunch of other sessions
and I would-- just to say one more thing and I know João has to run
to the next session--about GLAM.
Use GLAM, use libraries, work with the low-hanging fruit
which is the lecturers who are already teaching Semantic Web
and you can use this in a way that makes sense.
They're your best friends-- libraries, especially, will help you.
Hey. (chuckles)
Hello--Libraries will definitely help you in academic institutions,
usually there are libraries, work with the libraries to help
disseminate an idea to the faculty, to the students.
This will probably be the things that will spark the idea
for some lecturer to try it
and we will then conquer the world together.
- (audience 3) [inaudible] - (Shani) Yes.
[inaudible]
but so I'm a librarian and I wanted to know.
But one idea is for one-off lessons instead of like semester-long
or a quarter-long because I tend to-- I try to do more data literacy
with students.
And also how to get into faculties or your colleagues' brains
that this is great?
(Shani) João, can you give the mic to Ewan.
We will release João who has to run but we will take more,
five more minutes of questions.
Just really quick then.
So yeah, so it's like Martin Poulter
is running how to make a SPARQL query workshop fun
later this afternoon.
- And I would start with that. - (audience 3) Yeah.
Because it's like you were saying, it's about understanding
this sort of like how they can visualize the data story there intially
and work with simple SPARQL queries build them up and do much more.
That could be done quite simply in one workshop.
(audience 3) Yeah, that's how I do my workshops.
I do them like, okay, somebody has a question.
I'm like, okay, what are the-- all of the people who won this award
and then we do that query and then we see all the gaps.
And so then let's fill in all these gaps.
And that's how I tend to do these workshops,
but it's completely over their head. (chuckles)
(Shani) Just continue, you know.
Be vigilant and continue to doing it, continue doing the workshops
and at one point, someone will see the light.
And visualization is probably the best way to show impact, right.
So you're on the right direction it sounds.
Just go for it.
(audience 4) [inaudible] I didn't really know Wikipedia Adventure
then if you can make a Wikidata Adventure then
- that would be super cool to introduce. - (Shani) Well, we have Wikidata games.
- (Shani) So we can use those. - (audience 4) Yeah, yeah.
- (Shani) But we have to conclude. - (Debora) We're making Wikidata games.
(Shani) You're all welcome to talk to us.
Later on, thank you.
(applause)