Speakers:
James Neill, Assistant Professor, Psychology, University of Canberra
Mathieu O’Neil, Professor, Arts & Communication, University of Canberra
Abstract:
Wikis in open education: a psychology case study
James Neill will present on a project using Wikiversity as an experiential playground for teaching psychology students to learn about editing, creating, and collaborating together through co-creating open educational resources. This shared authoring project is constantly evolving and now consists of 1300+ student-developed online chapters on psychology topics about motivation and emotion. The principles that inform this approach include: open education, guided experiential learning, and self-determined learning.
Building epistemic resilience: reactions to fact-checking with Wikipedia in Australian classrooms
Mathieu O’Neil:
Any attempt to increase the informational resilience and skills of citizens must incorporate the need to restore trust in our public institutions. To that end, we propose three principles for an effective information literacy strategy: non-partisanship, speed, and transparency. These principles were put into practice during an information literacy program trialled in four Canberra (ACT) primary and secondary schools in 2022. This program innovated in two respects: first, because of the age of the students (information literacy is typically researched in high schools or universities); second, because we used Wikipedia as a fact-checking resource since Wikipedia’s auditable and distributed peer review neutralises, for the most part, misinformation. In this presentation, I outline why the current crisis of trust in public institutions mandates innovative approaches such as using Wikipedia to ‘read laterally’, and analyse the reactions we encountered when presenting our program in public and professional arenas. Our findings are that advocating the use of Wikipedia generated adverse reactions (though teachers were prepared to change their negative opinions); that teacher-librarians were highly supportive; and that there is a need to reform teacher education. Finally I review issues which still affect Wikipedia, such as disinformation attempts and systemic imbalances.
| Tuesday 13th June 2023 |
Melbourne 12:00 noon AEST Sydney 12:00 noon AEST Brisbane 12:00 noon AEST Adelaide 11:30 am ACST Perth 10:00 am AWST Hobart 12:00 noon AEST Participants outside Australia: convert to your local time here. |
| Webinar recording Mathieu’s slides James’ slides and presentation notes |
Mathieu O’Neil is Professor of Communication at the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre in the Faculty of Arts of Design. He founded the Journal of Peer Production in 2011 and the Digital Commons Policy Council think tank in 2021. His current research projects include analysing the political economy of researcher contributions on GitHub R repositories (funded by the Ford Foundation), mapping the health or openness of online discursive environments (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation) and developing new information literacy methods for schools (funded by the ACT Education Directorate and the US Embassy in Canberra).
James Neill is passionate about open academia, which means sharing knowledge openly. He works as an Assistant Professor in the Discipline of Psychology at the University of Canberra, Australia, where he teaches an undergraduate psychology unit called Motivation and Emotion. Previously, James has taught personality and individual differences, social psychology, and research methods in psychology. He is a custodian of English Wikiversity. James also has research expertise in outdoor education and green exercise, and more broadly in positive psychology and environmental psychology.
Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group 