This presentation by Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library, is a critical look inside some of Wikipedia’s sister projects. Wikipedia is successful as a highly-used open resource and as a productive community, but its format restricts it to a narrow concept of educational resouce. An enormous amount of research has been published about Wikipedia, but the other Wikimedia projects, are less well-known. We will look at Wikibooks as a platform and community for creating open textbooks, Wikidata as a source of open data for educational resources and Wikisource as a way to add educational value to historic texts. All these sites have “Edit” buttons and depend on users to build, evaluate, and repurpose open content. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks has been used in formal education as a platform for students to create their own textbooks (Kidd (2008), Lin (2009)). Each of these sites/communities has identifiable strengths and weaknesses, and each can be adapted by its users for an educational purpose.

OER16: Open Culture
19th & 20th April 2016, University of Edinburgh, UK

The 7th Open Educational Resources Conference, OER16: Open Culture, was held on the 19th-20th April 2016 at the University of Edinburgh.