User:Victuallers/Lough

__NOTITLE__   Loughborough University

Key facts

 * Research session for MSc Digital Marketing students.
 * Organised by Fiona Ellis-Chadwick and Roger Bamkin

Summary
In September 2016 Dr. Chadwick-Ellis sponsored a "Be Seen Be Read" conference that was organised by Dr Marianne Bamkin of LISU. One of the planned speakers was unavailable so Dr Bamkin asked Roger Bamkin to be a speaker. He spoke about copyright and ways to increase the Research Impact of university research using Wikipedia. After the talk Dr Chadwick-Ellis discussed the idea of training staff in the Management and Marketing department. Training took place and as a result one staff member used Wikipedia in her research.

In April 2017 it was arranged that post graduate Digital Marketing students would be set a Wikipedia based assignment. After introductory training using the Wikipedia visual editor they were set the task of writing 500 words on a subject related to Digital Marketing. They were asked to add at least five references and to target one new article or additions to three existing articles. They were given access to a guide created by Wikipedian Clem Rutter (see below). The assignment was completed in May with a range of results. Students were marked on their knowledge of digital marketing and on their engagement with Wikipedia. All the students had previously used Wikipedia but none had edited it seriously. At the end of the assignment all the students had created new additions in their sandboxes (Wikipedia practice areas). The students who had started early had received feedback on line from Wikipedia editors including Roger Bamkin and Clem Rutter. Many tried to add material to articles but they were surprised to find that many were quickly reverted. The main difficulty was that the students had not looked at existing Wikipedia entries before making additions. Students had created additions that read like essays giving insights into existing literature. However Wikipedia is not written in this style and students needed to reflect on their work. The high scoring students looked at the comments on the reversion of their work, made changes and tried again. One student tried this three times before taking the rejected article to bits and then adding parts to a number of different articles. This was successful. This meant that Wikipedia was improved and the student was awarded high marks for their resilience and tenacity.

Overall the students made constructive additions to many articles. Some of these were put together into a Wikibook to show off their work. A quick estimate showed that the additions to Wikipedia were being seen every four seconds. This collaboration has illustrated a number of areas where we could improve but the overall impact of this assignment is considerable. Students will be able to show potential employers the work the results of their assignment. Lecturers can see the book that was produced and the Action Research that they have created.

Other resources

 * Be Seen Be Read, Roger Bamkin
 * Clem Rutter's guide to Wikpedia - A similar version to that used

Other courses

 * A small course was organised for Loughborough University Staff