Hello all,
Recently, we've announced two new board members and released our annual
plan. We've also announced our sponsorship of WikiConference USA 2015,
launched our Wikipedia Visiting Scholars, and a Summer Research Fellowship
with Andrew Lih. We are also preparing for a new initiative, the Wikipedia
Year of Science. Finally, we've rolled out a new Dashboard tool for course
management.
With so much going on, we thought we'd share some details to keep everyone
in the loop.
** Sue Gardener and Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer* were elected to the Wiki
Education Foundation board. As most of you will know, Sue Gardner was the
executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) from 2007 to 2014. Dr.
Bartsch-Zimmer, of the University of Chicago, is the Inaugural Director of
the University’s Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. We're
very excited to have them both. (Read more here
<http://wikiedu.org/blog/2015/07/21/gardner-bartsch-zimmer-elected-to-wiki-e…>
).
** The Wiki Ed Annual Plan* (available here
<http://wikiedu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Annual-Plan-2015%E2%80%9316-2…>)
covers the first year of our work, and looks ahead to what we’ll set out to
achieve in our next fiscal year (July 1 through June 30). Our biggest goals
include scaling the impact of our classroom program, improving content
quality and the experience of our students, and deepening connections
between academia and Wikipedia through research opportunities such as our
Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program. (Read more here
<http://wikiedu.org/blog/2015/07/20/annual_plan2/>).
** We're very excited to be a sponsor of WikiConference USA 2015.* The
event is co-organized by the National Archives and Records Administration,
Wikimedia D.C., and Wikimedia NYC. It will take place at the National
Archives Building in Washington, D.C., from October 9–11, 2015.
Presentation proposals and scholarship applications are open! Find out more
at wikiconferenceusa.org.
* Early last month, we announced we'd be administering the *Wikipedia
Visiting Scholars program in the US and Canada*. The Visiting Scholar
position offers Wikipedia editors access to journals, special collections,
and other research tools. Scholars’ use of these materials increases
visibility for collections, advancing the library’s mission of expanding
community engagement. (Read more here
<http://wikiedu.org/blog/2015/07/13/visiting-scholars/>).
* We're hosting our inaugural *Summer Research Fellow, Andrew Lih*
(User:Fuzheado). Andrew is working on strategies and selecting case studies
for ways to connect university libraries, museums, and archives to
instructors, students, and/or the community of Wikipedia editors as part of
the Year of Science. (Read more here
<http://wikiedu.org/blog/2015/07/27/welcome-andrew-lih-first-summer-research…>
).
* *We've launched a new course management tool, the Dashboard*. The
Dashboard fully handles the course setup and assignment design process, and
gives an even better picture of what student editors are doing throughout
the term. (Read more here
<http://wikiedu.org/blog/2015/07/28/dashboard-launch/>).
* Finally, we're preparing a 2016 initiative aimed at improving science
coverage on Wikipedia: *the Wikipedia Year of Science*. We're seeking out
volunteers, instructors, academic associations and others who are
interested in a focused, sustained campaign to improve Wikipedia's science
content while giving students an opportunity to improve science
communications skills. (Read more here
<http://wikiedu.org/blog/2015/07/24/year-of-science-focus/>).
We've been very busy here at Wiki Ed - and on top of all this, we've also
been supporting a record number of courses. I'll share more details on
student work and instructor satisfaction in the next few days. And as
always, if you're interested in following Wiki Ed's work, you can find
frequent updates on our blog <http://wikiedu.org/blog>.
Cheers,
Eryk Salvaggio
Communications Manager
Wiki Education Foundation
eryk(a)wikiedu.org
User:Eryk (Wiki Ed) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eryk_(Wiki_Ed)>
@WikiEducation <https://twitter.com/WikiEducation>
wikiedu.org
*Our organization supports the Wikipedia Education Program in the United
States and Canada.*
Sage, the Wikiwho programmers in Germany volunteered to help with the
Accuracy Review bot, and fundraising is proceeding well, so this can happen
sooner. I have been trying to ask Frank Schulenberg to join me
in supporting measuring both student edits and a wider random sample of
edits, as I believe a decent experimental design allowing for a
long-term cost-benefit analysis would require anyway, and I'm interested in
measuring human paid accuracy review on other subsets of articles, such as
those with known conflicted interest advocacy, controversy, and high
readership. From my perspective, that a student made an edit is just one of
those factors which could put a revision towards the front of
a review queue.
So, where is a list of recent student editors?
Another topic from last month is whether participating in an accuracy
review task which would ordinarily be paid (for humans) is somewhat
indistinguishable from a very general form of computer aided instruction. I
hope this has utopian implications that tuition and labor will somehow
cancel out, but while very optimistic, I am not yet anywhere nearly that
optimistic. This does seem similar to the parsimonious situation in my
professional field where a reading tutor can be indistinguishable from a
pronunciation tutor in certain circumstances; it doesn't alleviate the need
for writing instruction.
In any case, that question suggests collecting measurements about whether
unpaid volunteers are willing to participate in accuracy review tasks.
So, nobody will be turned away just because they want to work for free. In
fact, we may try to attract conflict of interest advocacy editors into the
volunteer pool in order to see if we can automatically discover them via
second order review.
Please let me know your thoughts.
On Monday, April 20, 2015, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 5:27 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','jsalsman(a)gmail.com');>> wrote:
>
>> Thank you, Sage, for your reply:
>>
>> >... I've been chatting with the folks working on this, and they are
>> actually
>> > quite close to having a usable API for estimated article quality —
>> which I'm
>> > super excited about building into our dashboard. The human part of it
>> will
>> > be down the road a bit, but the main purpose there will be to
>> continually
>> > improve the model by having experienced editors create good ratings
>> data for
>> > training the model. But I expect that there won't be much trouble in
>> finding
>> > Wikipedians to pitch on that.
>> >
>> > I had actually been exploring the idea of setting up a crowdsourcing
>> system
>> > where we might pay experienced editors to do before and after ratings
>> for
>> > student work, but at this point I'm much more enthusiastic about the
>> machine
>> > learning approach that the revision-scoring-as-a-service project is
>> taking —
>> > since that is easy to scale up and maintain long term.
>>
>> I recommend measuring the optimal amount of human input and review. It
>> is very substantially nonzero if you want to maximize the
>> encyclopedia's utility function. There is really nobody at the WEF who
>> wants to try to co-mentor accuracy review? What if there was a cap on
>> total hours needed. I am sure you wouldn't regret it, but I am also
>> happy to continue on my own for the time being.
>
>
> I'm definitely interested in better systems for human review — especially
> for the work of student editors — alongside automated qualtiy estimation
> tools. It's not a project Wiki Ed has the capacity to take on right now,
> though.
>
> -Sage
>
THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON E-LEARNING AND E-TECHNOLOGIES IN
EDUCATION (ICEEE2015)
Surya University, Indonesia (21 KM from Jakarta Airport)
September 10-12, 2015
http://sdiwc.net/conferences/iceee2015/
The conference welcomes papers on the following (but not limited to)
research topics:
- Accessibility to Disabled Users
- Assessment and Accreditation of Courses and Institutions
- Assessment Methods in Blended Learning Environments
- Assessment Software Tools
- Authoring Tools and Content Development
- AV-Communication and Multimedia
- Blended Learning
- Collaborative Learning
- Community Building
- Computer-Aided Assessment
- Context Dependent Learning
- Cooperation with Industry in Teaching
- Course Design and E-Learning Curriculae
- Critical Success Factors in Distance Learning
- Digital Libraries for E-Learning
- Distance and E-Learning in a Global Context
- Distance Education
- Educating the Educators
- E-Learning Hardware and Software
- E-learning in Electrical, Mechanical, Civil and information
engineering
- E-Learning Platforms, Portals
- E-Learning Success Cases
- Errors in E-Learning
- E-Testing and new Test Theories
- Groupware Tools
- Higher Education vs. Vocational Training
- Immersive Learning
- Impact and Achievements of International Initiatives
- Intelligent Tutoring Systems
- Interdisciplinary Programs for Distance Education
- International Partnerships in Teaching
- Joint Degrees
- Learning Organization
- Lifelong Learning: Continuing Professional Training and Development
- Medical Applications
- Metrics and Performance Measurement
- Mobile Learning (M-learning)
- Ontologies and Meta-Data Standards
- Pedagogy Enhancement with E-Learning
- Security Aspects
- Simulated Communities and Online Mentoring
- Standards and Interoperability
- Supervising and Managing Student Projects
- Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning
- Teacher Evaluation
- Technology Enhanced Learning
- Technology Support for Pervasive Learning
- Theoretical Bases of E-Learning Environments
- Virtual Labs and Virtual Classrooms
- Web-based Learning, Wikis and Blogs
Researchers are encouraged to submit their work electronically. All
papers will be fully refereed by a minimum of two specialized referees.
Before final acceptance, all referees comments must be considered. Paper
submission can be done at
http://sdiwc.net/conferences/iceee2015/openconf/openconf.php
Important Dates
==============
SUBMISSION DEADLINE : AUGUST 15, 2015
Notification of Acceptance: 2 weeks from the submission date or Aug. 25,
2015
Camera Ready Deadline : September 1, 2015
Registration Deadline : September 1, 2015
Conference Dates : September 10-12, 2015