Wikidata:WikidataCon 2017/Notes/Wikidata & Education: Using Wikidata as an Educational Platform

Title: Wikidata & Education: Using Wikidata as an Educational Platform

Speaker(s) edit

Name or username: Shani Evenstein

Abstract edit

Wikidata facilitates a variety of learning opportunities and "potential applications across all areas of sciences, technology and cultures"(Vrandečić & Krötzsch, 2014). It offers humanity a way to cope with the data and information overload that characterize the digital age, and allows users to interact with data and information in a more meaningful way that was not technically possible before. As one of the largest semantic knowledge bases in existence, Wikidata helps to change the interactions between humans and knowledge, and facilitate new learning opportunities for users across all disciplines. However, celebrating only its 5th anniversary, Wikidata is still a very young project, and the global Wiki community, as well as the academic and research communities, are yet to explore its potential as a learning and teaching tool. What are some of the current uses of WD in the classroom? What are some of the advantages and challenges while trying to implement it into the curriculum? And what are some future ideas to go about this process? The purpose of this Round Table is to explore practical and fun ways of bringing Wikidata into the classroom, while having a global discussion about -

  • Current uses of WD in the classroom
  • The advantages of using WD not only for learning, but also as a way to develop critical thinking and 21st century skills
  • The challenges the Wikidatans and Educators have met so far and how they have been handled
  • Brainstorm about future possibilities of bringing the magic of Wikidata to new generations of learners

The Round Table will host Wikidatans and Educators who are currently using Wikidata as a learning platform, and will encourage a live discussion with participants of this session.

Collaborative notes of the session edit

What this session isn't
  • teaching WD skillls
What this session is
  • teaching *with* WD
  • Specific assignments in class
  • specific skills / literacies that students need: data literacy
How to get started
our experiences teaching with DW so far
  • does / don'ts
  • queries that work regardless of where you are
  • visualization

Typs of assignments: working in small groups - 20 min

  • Programming/UX / design / visualization
  • Humanities / social studies / Gender studies
    • An easy subject is Gender Studies. "Female french engineers". How we define french (citizenship, place of birth...); engineer is more difficult, what kinds are included (different logics by language). Good example for subclasses. Female is easily defined with gender. You can have a breakdown on subclasses.
    • You can also learn that architects are a subclass of engineers in arabic, as you see how it is organized in different Wikipedias.
    • You can use this kind of demography studies in time or place, so you can track historical events through data.
  • life sciences medicine

these students can actually use Wikidata to collect knowledge, as done here: https://figshare.com/articles/Volatile_Organic_Compounds_A_Detailed_Account_of_Identity_Origin_Activity_and_Pathways/3466805 or about a disease as

here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/topic/Q202864

add labels & descriptions to items

presenting results: 15 min

wrapping us: 5 min.

Engagement areas

Topics - coverage, bias, domains of knowledge

Methods - database mechanics, api, query

Ontology - modeling relationships

Visualization - display and discovery, storytelling

Usability and interaction - ux design, Making games

add more thematic areas?

What data literacies must students acquire?

provenance of data sets and bias

references, notability, verifiability

confirmation bias

formulating hypotheses and research questions

workflows

ADD MORE

semantic web literacies

Examples

Andrew - Union College query and visualization of its downfall

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LapZ57Tim3K0SsDstLjykET9ffVE96rwUu44Bbwx-MM/edit#slide=id.g1f43ddb61a_0_495

Asaf - You CAN teach SPARQL and Wikidata query well

Shani - classroom?

Ideas from Lydia keynote

Game design - use Wikidata to make more game like interfaces

magnus has spec’ed but will not build mix n match 2

Have class create everything is connected examples

https://tools.wmflabs.org/everythingisconnected/index.html

Gender gap on Wikidata explorer - gender studies

Explore different decades and break down why some ranges have different proportions

Note-taker(s):

This is the Etherpad for note-taking of this session.

Please document the session so that others can understand what happened in the session

Resource page on Wikidata edit

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Teaching_with_Wikidata

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikidataCommunity/

Programming, User interface, Design, Visualizations group edit

Recommended properties based on an input

Create a google form of questions that can take inputs based on a particular theme and export it to a spreadsheet for validation/upload

Alternatively an app that does the same

Do form validation based on constraints

Ability to send data by SMS ton contribute to WD

Campaigns to contribute data about their locality - weather/rainfall, species

high resolution data that can be processed en mass to refine into more reliable data colleced on village via school children (see https://schoolwiki.in )

Mobile interface to contribute has simple gestures: swipe to select the right option

20 questions quiz packages on themes

Telegram bots

Use audio channels to contribute: speech to text,

Translation of texts and labels once they are visualized. Students want to know where this "automatic generated data" comes from and how they can have in their own language.

Tool that asks students abouth the languages they speak and invites them to add labels and descriptions to items related to the course

Humanities and social studies edit

An example is Gender Studies. "Female french engineers". How we define french (citizenship, place of birth...); engineer is more difficult, what kinds are included (different logics by language). Good example for subclasses.

Female is easily defined with gender. You can have a breakdown on subclasses.

You can also learn that architects are a subclass of engineers in arabic, as you see how it is organized in different Wikipedias.

You can use this kind of demography studies in time or place, so you can track historical events through data.

Example: witch trials as signals of social anxiety, search for scapegoats: compare timeline against epidemics, population dips

Changes in artistic output due to social conditions, e.g. marriage law change affects early romantic novels. Compare timelines/ countries

Bias studies: https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Genero_oreka. You can track jobs in any given Wikipedia vs the total, and also jobs by gender in each Wikipedia. Understanding why this happens.

Life science, medicine, biology edit

these students can actually use Wikidata to collect knowledge, as done here: https://figshare.com/articles/Volatile_Organic_Compounds_A_Detailed_Account_of_Identity_Origin_Activity_and_Pathways/3466805

add labels & descriptions to items

run the example queries in your area and check the results for quality

write some new example queries

find unsourced statements on items of particular classes, and add a suitable reference for that statement

review property proposals in your area

http://www.allourideas.org/Wikidata4Coursework