history | Open World

history | Open World
Open World
Lorna M Campbell
It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to share an end of year reflection in January, I always intend to do this in December, but it never happens, so January it is. I’ve been in two minds whether to write one this year though because 2024 did
not
go as expected.
View from the ward
At the beginning of the year I woke up one morning and couldn’t feel my hands properly. That was the start of the rapid onset of a bewildering and debilitating range of symptoms. After numerous scans, tests, and two hospital admissions, I was eventually diagnosed with a
rare autoimmune disease
. It’s not curable, but it is treatable, with a lot of medication and mixed success.  I’ve been lucky to be more or less fit and healthy for most of my life, so to suddenly lose the ability to do so many things that I previously took for granted has been challenging to say the least.  I can no longer dance, sew, or wear my fancy shoes, writing is a challenge, walking is slooooow some days, and traveling any distance without assistance is difficult. Having to slow down has forced me to recenter and I’m still trying to figure out what life will be like from this point on, who I’ll be when I can no longer do so many of the things that make me who I am.  There’s very little data about how this condition is likely to progress, hopefully things will improve once we get the medication right, but who knows?  I’m just trying to take it as it comes.
Despite all of the above, I’m still working with the
OER Service
at the University of Edinburgh. I’m immensely grateful to my colleagues for their support, and to my managers who have put adjustments in place to enable me to keep working from home. I really miss going over to the office in Edinburgh, but the four hour round trip is beyond me for the time being. I never thought I’d miss that Scotrail commute but here we are.
OER24 Conference
MTU Cork
At the beginning of the year, before things took a turn for the worse, I went to the OER24 Conference in Cork with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto, to present a paper on
Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education
.  It was great to be there with Mayu and there was a lot of interest in her experience as a student working with the OER Service. The highlight of the conference for me was undoubtedly Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz’s inspiring keynote,
The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at the crossroads
, which explored their own lives and experiences as open educators and the possibilities generated by their profound and timely
Higher Education for Good
.  You can read my reflection on the the conference here
OER24: Gathering Courage
. Also! MTU has some really interesting architecture.
Their Finest Hour
Their Finest Hour
project came to an end in June with the launch of the University of Oxford’s
online archive
of 25,000 new stories and artefacts from the Second World War, all of which have been shared under open licence.  I’m very proud that our
Edinburgh collection day
gathered and contributed 50 stories and many hundreds of photographs, thanks to the incredible work of project intern Eden Swimer.  You can read Eden’s thoughtful reflection on his internship here
Reflections on ‘Their Finest Hour’
.  I nominated Eden for an ISG Recognition Award in September and was delighted that he won the award for
Student Staff Member of the Year
Learning Analytics
A fair chunk of my time last year was taken up with setting up and acting as business lead for a new learning analytics project. As part of the university’s
VLE Excellence
programme, the project aims to identify the learning analytics data available in Learn and other centrally supported learning technology applications, and enable staff and students to access and use it to support their teaching and learning.  It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in anything related to learning analytics so it’s been interesting to get my head back into this space again, particularly as the project is focused on empowering staff and students to access their own learning analytics data..
EDE to DSDT
In October we had a small restructuring at work and my team moved from Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) into a new section, Digital Skills, Design and Training (DSDT). I’ve really enjoyed working in EDE over the last 5 years, and we’ll continue working closely with many of the services there, but I’m also excited about the opportunities the new section will bring.  I’m particularly looking forward to working with our Wikimedian in Residence again and exploring new open textbook projects with our Graphic Design Team.
AI and the Commons
I’ve been dipping my toes back into the murky waters of ethics, AI and the commons and have written a couple of blog posts on the ethics of AI in relation to
OER
and
contested museum collections
All the other stuff…
Because my health has been so ropey, I’ve had to step back, hopefully temporarily, from most of the additional voluntary work I do, including assessing CMALT, sitting on award panels, contributing to City University of London’s MSc in Digital Literacies and Open Practice, and attending policy events.  I really miss the connections these activities used to bring so I’ve been trying to focus more on reconnecting through social media networks….
…which has been “interesting” given the hellscape of most social media platforms these days. I’ve barely used facebook for over a decade, though I still have an account there, primarily for finding last cats (long story). Twitter was always my main social media channel, I’ve had an account there since 2007, and it’s where I found my open education community. Seeing twitter degenerate into a fascist quagmire has made me so angry, however it was still a wrench to leave.  In March we mothballed the femedtech account, I stepped back from my own account later in the year, before finally deleting it. This was one of my last retweets. It seems fitting.
I’ve been slowly migrating to
Bluesky
and
Mastodon
over the course of the year and it’s been great to start building new and old communities there. I like the different pace of the two platforms.  Bluesky feels like the place to keep up to date with news and events, while Mastodon provides space for slower, quieter, thoughtful conversations.
This enforced slowing down, together with the changing social media landscape, has also prompted me to start blogging again. I hadn’t abandoned this blog completely but I’d definitely got out of the habit of writing here regularly. It’s been good to take the time to think and reflect again, and to try and express some of that reflection in words. At the end of the year I wrote a post about
Slowing Down
which really seemed to strike a chord with people. Across all these different spaces, it feels like little dormant shoots of community are reemerging. We need these human connections now more than ever.
Beginnings and Endings
On a personal level September was a month of beginnings and endings. My daughter went off to university and it’s been great to see her stretch her wings and find her people. It’s also been illuminating to see the university’s systems from the student side.
In September we had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Josh.  He was magnificent, and he was my best boy, despite his habit of going round the neighbourhood scrounging for food and pretending to be a stray. He turned up twice on a local lost cats facebook group.  The shame.  I miss him terribly.
Josh 2014 – 2024
I also had to say goodbye to our family home in Carriegreich on the Isle of Harris. This was my grandparents and then my father’s home and I spent a lot of time here during my childhood.  This is where I learned how to cast a line, set an (illegal) net and row a boat, collect the eggs and feed the sheep, tell a guillemot from a razorbill, pick up Russian klondykers on the ancient shortwave radio, and keep an eye out for the grey fishery protection vessels sliding out of the mist.  It’s where I spent hours wandering over the croft and the shore lost in other worlds. I very rarely remember dreams, but I still dream about this house and this shore.  We had hoped to visit the house one last time, but sadly that wasn’t possible because Josh was so unwell.  We said goodbye to Josh and to Carriegreich within the week.
Carriegreich
To try and make some sense of where I am now, I’ve been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s
Tehanu
.  It’s always been one of my favourite Le Guin books, I love the writing and the pacing and the fact that it centres the experiences of an older woman finding her place and her power in a changing world through the different phases of her life.
“Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.”
I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I am sure there will always be something to be done.
I know it’s a crowded field, but I came across an AI / open data development recently that really made me stop and take a breath.
The Living Museum
introduces itself as follows:
If the artifacts in museums could talk, what would you say to them? Would you ask about their origins, or what life was like back in their eras? Or would you simply listen to their stories?
Created by an independent developer,
Jonathan Talmi
, The Living Museum is an experimental AI interface that uses content from the BM’s open licensed
digital collections database
to enable users to curate personalised exhibits and “talk” to individual artefacts about their history and origins.  The developer is unaffiliated with the British Museum and makes it clear that the data is used under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA licence.
In an
introductory blog post
Talmi says
I hope this project demonstrates that technology like AI can increase immersion, thereby improving educational outcomes, without sacrificing authenticity or factuality.
The app was launched on the Museums Computer Group mailing list and twitter a couple of weeks ago and it was met with a generally favourable response.  However there were some dissenting voices, from curators, art historians, and authors, who pointed out the problematic nature of imposing AI generated voices onto artefacts of deep spiritual and cultural significance, whose presence in the BM’s collections is hugely contested.
Others questioned the macabre ethics of foisting an artificial voice on actual human remains, such as the museum’s collection of mummies.  I had a surreal conversation with the mummy of Cleopatra, who died in Thebes aged 17, during the reign of Trajan. It was a deeply unsettling experience.
This is where “authenticity and factuality” were both sacrificed…
The response actually acknowledges the disrespectful and ethically questionable nature of the whole project. My head was starting to melt at this point.
Pressing the question of repatriation prompts the voice to “step out of the artificial artifact persona”…
The whole experience was as surreal as it was disturbing
There was also criticism from some quarters that the developer had “exploited” the work of professional curators by using the British Museum’s data set without their explicit knowledge or permission.  It’s important to note that the CC BY-NC-SA licence does explicitly allow anyone to use the British Museum’s data within the terms of the licence, however just because the license says you
can
, doesn’t necessarily mean you
should
. When it comes to reusing open content, the licence is not the only thing that should be taken into consideration.  This is one of the key points raised by the
Ethics of Open Sharing
working group commissioned by Creative Commons in 2021, and led by Josie Fraser. The report of the working group acknowledges that not everything should be shared openly, and highlights issues relating to cultural appropriation:
Ethical open sharing may require working in partnership with individuals, communities and groups and ensuring their voices are heard and approaches respected. While in some cases openly sharing resources can help to promote cultural heritage and redress gaps in knowledge, in others it may be experienced as cultural insensitivity, disrespect or appropriation — for example, in relation to sacred objects or stories and funerary remains.
Something that both the British Museum and developers using its digital collections should perhaps consider.
By coincidence, the launch of The Living Museum coincided with the release of
Mati Diop
‘s film
Dahomey
, winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award.
Dahomey
, also gives a voice to sacred cultural artefacts; a collection of looted treasures being repatriated from France to the former kingdom of Dahomey, in current day Benin. In Diop’s absorbing and hypnotic film the power figure of the Dahomeyan king Ghezo speaks in
Fon
, his voice disembodied and electronically modified.
In an interview with Radio 4’s
Screenshoot
(23:20), Diop spoke eloquently about “the violence of the absence of the artefacts from the African continent.”
“These artefacts are not objects, they have been objectified by the Western eye, by the colonial perspective, locked into different stages, art objects, ethnographic objects, even locked into beauty.”
“To me it was immediate to give back a voice to these artefacts because I felt that the film is what restitution is about, which is giving back a voice, which is giving back a narrative, a perspective. The film tries to embody the meaning of restitution.”
I was lucky enough to see
Dahomey
at the GFT accompanied by a conversation with Giovanna Vitelli, Head of Collections at
The Hunterian
, and Dr Christa Roodt and Andreas Giorgallis, University of Glasgow.  The Hunterian is just one of a number of museums interrogating the harms perpetuated by their colonial legacy, through their
Curating Discomfort
intervention.  The conversation touched on power, control and sacredness, with Vitelli noting
“Possession means power. We, the museums, hold the power, and control the power of language.  The film speaks powerfully about voices we in the global north do not hear.”
I’ve written in the past about the importance of considering
whose voices are included and excluded
from open spaces and the creation and curation of open knowledge. On the surface it may appear that AI initiatives facilitated by the cultural commons, like The Living Museum, have the potential to bring collections to life and give a voice to marginalised subjects, however it’s important to question the authenticity of those voices.  By imposing inauthentic AI generated voices on culturally sensitive artefacts there is a serious risk of perpetuating exploitative colonial legacies and racist ideology, rather than addressing harms and increasing knowledge equity. Something for us all to think about.
Posting an end of year round up at the end of January might seem a bit daft, but I’m already one step ahead of last year, when I posted my end of year reflection in February!
The beginning of the year was a succession of real highs and lows.  UCU entered a long phase of industrial action which came at a particularly challenging time for me as January and February is usually when I’m preparing for Open Education Week and the OER Conference.  However I also took some time out for a trip to New York with friends, which turned out to be one of the high points of my year.
Open Education Week
For Open Education Week we ran a webinar that celebrated
10 years of open course development at the University of Edinburgh
and shared the open course creation workflow that we’ve developed and refined over the years.
OER23 Conference
It was great to see the OER Conference returning to Scotland in March when it was hosted by UHI in Inverness.  Inverness is a place that is very close to my heart as it’s the main city in the Highlands and it’s also were we used to go on holiday when I was a kid.  Inverness is still a stopping off point on the journey home when I go to visit family in Stornoway so I had a slightly weird feeling of nostalgia and home-sickness while I was there, it was odd being in Inverness and not traveling on further north and west.
One of the themes of this years conference was Open Scotland +10 and Joe Wilson and I ran a number of sessions including a pre-conference workshop and closing plenary to reflect on how the open education landscape in Scotland has evolved over the last decade, and to discuss potential ways to advance open education across all sectors of Scottish education.
Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.
Here, the closing Panel Plenary session
Open Scotland @10
OER23 Conference: Imagining Hopeful Futures
Open Scotland @10 Plenary Panel synthesis & outputs
Generative AI
Like many working in technical, educational and creative sectors I found it impossible to ignore the discourse around generative AI, though I hope I managed to avoid getting swept up in the hype and catastrophising.  In July I wrote an off-the-cuff summary of some of the many ethical issues related to generative AI and LLMs that are becoming increasingly hard to ignore:
Generative AI – Ethics all the way down
.  I appreciated having an opportunity to revisit these issues again at the end of the year when I joined the
ALT Winter Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence
which provided much food for thought. Helen Beetham’s keynote
Whose Ethics? Whose AI? A relational approach to the challenge of ethical AI
was particularly thoughtful and thought provoking.
Student Interns
Much of the summer was taken up with recruiting and managing our Open Content Curator student interns.  It’s always a joy working with our interns, their energy and enthusiasm is endlessly inspiring, and this year’s interns, August and Mayu, were no exception. I suggested it might be fun for them to interview each other about their experience of working with the OER Service and, with the help of our fabulous Media Team, they produced this lovely video.
I was delighted when August and Mayu were shortlisted for the Student Employee of the Year Award in Information Services Group’s Staff Recognition Awards, in acknowledgement of their outstanding work with the OER Service and their wider contribution to ISG and the University.
Their Finest Hour
The OER Service welcomed another student intern in the summer, Eden Swimer, who joined us to help run a digital collection day as part of the University of Oxford’s
Their Finest Hour
, a
National Lottery Heritage funded project at the University of Oxford,
which
is
collect
ing
and
preserving
the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War.
Organising and running the digital collection day proved to be a huge undertaking and we couldn’t have done it without the help of 26 volunteers from across ISG and beyond who committed so much time and energy to the project.
The digital collection day took place in Rainy Hall, New College at the end of November and it was a huge success.
Over 100 visitors attended and volunteers recorded over 50 interviews and took thousands of photographs, all of which will be uploaded to an open licensed archive that will be launched by the University of Oxford in June this year.  It was a deeply moving event, many of the stories recorded were truly remarkable and the visitors clearly appreciated having the opportunity to share their families stories.  In some cases these stories were being told by the last surviving relatives of those who had witnessed the historic events of WW2 and there was a real sense of preserving their experiences for posterity.
Their Finest Hour digital collection day by Fiona Hendrie
The collection day was covered by STV and you can see a short clip of their news item here:
Second World War memories to be preserved at university collection day
Publications
It was a privilege to work with co-authors Frances Bell, Lou Mycroft, Guilia Forsythe and Anne-Marie Scot to contribute a chapter on the “FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education” to Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz’s timely and necessary
Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures.
“Quilting has always been a communal activity and, most often, women’s activity. It provides a space where women are in control of their own labour: a space where they can come together to share their skill, pass on their craft, tell their stories, and find support. These spaces stand outside the neoliberal institutions that seek to appropriate and exploit our labour, our skill, and our care. The FemEdTech-quilt assemblage has provided a space for women and male allies from all over the world to collaborate, to share their skills, their stories, their inspiration, and their creativity. We, the writers of this chapter, are five humans who each has engaged with the FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education in different ways, and who all have been active in the FemEdTech network.”
I was also invited to submit a paper to a special open education practice edition of
Edutec Journal
.  Ewan McAndrew, Melissa Highton and I co-authored a paper on “Supporting open education practice: Reflective case studies from the University of Edinburgh.”
“This paper outlines the University of Edinburgh’s long-running strategic commitment to supporting sustainable open education practice (OEP) across the institution. It highlights how the University provides underpinning support and digital capability for OEP through central services working with policy makers, partners, students, and academics to support co-creation and active creation and use of open educational resources to develop digital literacy skills, transferable attributes, and learning enhancement. We present a range of case studies and exemplars of authentic OEP evidenced by reflective practice and semi-structured ethnographic interviews, including Wikimedia in the Curriculum initiatives, open textbook production, and co-creation of interdisciplinary STEM engagement resources for schools. The paper includes recommendations and considerations, providing a blueprint that other institutions can adopt to encourage sustainable OEP. Our experience shows that mainstreaming strategic support for OEP is key to ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
Writing this paper was an interesting experience as Edutec is a research journal that expects evidence to be presented in a very particular way.  As a service division, we support practice rather than undertaking academic research, so the case studies we present are based on authentic reflective practice rather than empirical research, however it was useful to think about this practice from a different perspective.
Wikimedia UK
In July I was awarded Honorary Membership of Wikimedia UK in recognition of my contribution to the work of the charity during my six years as a Trustee. When my term as a trustee came to an end, I was hoping that I’d have more time to contribute to the Wikimedia projects.  That hasn’t quite happened, I didn’t manage to do any Wikipedia editing in 2023, but I did enjoy taking part in
Wiki Loves Monuments
again.  I also digitised some pictures I took of the Glasgow Garden festival way back in 1988 and uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons to share them with the fabulous
After the Garden Festival
project, which is attempting to locate and archive the legacy of the festival.
Teddy Bears Picnic, sponsored by Moray District Council. CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell on Wikimedia Commons.
ALT
I made short-lived trip to the ALT Conference in Warwick in September.  Unfortunately I  had to leave early as I came down with a stinking cold. I was really disappointed to have to miss most of the conference as it was outgoing CEO Maren Deepwell’s last event and I was also due to receive an Honorary Life Membership of ALT award. It was a huge honour to receive this award as ALT has been a significant part of my professional life for over two decades now.  You can read my short reflection on the award here:
Honorary Life Membership of ALT.
For almost three decades Lorna has been a champion of equitable higher education and an open education activist. Lorna ‘s lifelong commitment to and passion for equality and diversity clearly is evident in her work, yet Lorna tends not to push herself forward and celebrate – or even self-acknowledge – her many achievements.
ALT press release
Kenneth White, 1936 – 2023
I was deeply saddened to hear of the death of Kenneth White in August.  Despite being an avid reader of Scottish poetry, and having studied Scottish Literature at Glasgow University for a couple of years, I hadn’t come across White until my partner introduced me to him in 2002.  His absence from Glasgow’s curriculum, and indeed his relative obscurity in his homeland, is striking given that he was a graduate of Glasgow University who went on to become the chair of 20th century poetics at
Paris-Sorbonne.
White, however, has always been a writer who
divides
the
critics
, particularly in Scotland. A poet, writer, philosopher, traveller, and self-identified transcendental Scot, White founded the International Institute of GeoPoetics and was a regular visitor to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where I was fortunate to see him read.  To say that White’s writing, particularly his meditations on openness and the Atlantic edge, had a profound effect on me, is something of an understatement. This blog is named after the title of White’s collected poetic works and his lines frequently find their way into more unguarded pieces I’ve written.  I’ll leave you with a few words from the man himself.
At the end of each year, I used to write a round up of significant work and life events over the previous 12 months.  That didn’t happen last year.  Just getting to the end of the year felt like an achievement.  That was enough.  I’ve kept this blog ticking over for the last year, though I’ve written fewer posts here than in previous years.  It’s partly that I’ve been blogging elsewhere, on the
OpenEd
Teaching Matters
, and
Open Textbooks
blogs. But it’s also a question of bandwidth; surviving in the midst of a global pandemic, and taking care of those around you, be they family, friends, or work colleagues, takes up a lot of emotional energy, so there often wasn’t much energy left over to reflect on what I was actually doing.  I’m still committed to using this blog to share my practice though, so I want to end the year on a hopeful note with a blog post about all the things I’ve done that I didn’t manage to write about at the time, or that I only touched on in passing.
Open eTextbooks for Access to Music Education
At the start of the year I was awarded a University of Edinburgh
Student Experience Grant
, and together with Dr Nikki Moran and three brilliant student interns from the Reid School of Music, we undertook an experimental project to repurpose open resources from an existing MOOC and on-campus course to create a prototype open textbook,
Fundamentals of Music Theory
.  Working with Nikki and the students was a delight and we learned a lot about different publishing platforms and the process of editing and creating ebooks in different formats. My InDesign skills are basic at best, but my old HTML skills came in very handy!  We gave a talk about the project at the OERxDomains Conference,
The Scale of Open: Repurposing Open Resources for Music Education
, and it was great to receive such positive feedback on the importance of working together with students on projects like this. In his
final reflection
on the project our intern Ifeanyichukwu Ezinmadu wrote;
“This project has got me inspired towards creating an independent OER project in music theory based on the ABRSM theory syllabus. To achieve this new goal of mine, I look forward to deploying skills developed on this project such as collaboration, research, design thinking, and other technical skills. I will dearly miss the entire team that has made this Project a possibility – Lorna, Charlie, Nikki, Kari, and Ana – and I look forward to engaging with other opportunities within and beyond the University of Edinburgh to learn and contribute meaningfully towards music education projects.”
You can read more about the project on our blog here:
Open eTextbooks for Access to Music Education
, and download our open textbook here:
Fundamentals of Music Theory.
Learn Ultra Base Navigation Upgrade
Another project I was involved in earlier this year was the Learn Ultra Base Navigation Upgrade project, which investigated the implications and feasibility of upgrading to UBN in advance of a full upgrade to Learn Ultra.  I’m not usually directly involved in supporting and delivering our Learn VLE service, but we were short handed so I was drafted in to do some of the project management. Although it was a bit of a steep learning curve for me, it was a really good opportunity to connect with colleagues who maintain and support the Learn Service and the Learn Foundations project, and it was interesting to have a preview of UBN and the functionality it provides.
OER Policy update
On more familiar territory, I enjoyed working with our Education Technology Policy officer Neil McCormick to review and revise the University of Edinburgh’s OER Policy.  The University’s original policy was approved in 2015 and five years later, in September this year, our new policy was approved by Education Committee.  This new policy, which has adopted UNESCO’s definition of OER, strengthens the University’s commitment to open knowledge and achieving the aims of the Agenda for Sustainable Development.  You can read about the new OER Policy on Teaching Matters here:
A new OER Policy for the University
, and access the policy itself here:
University of Edinburgh OER Policy
Open Education Global Awards
The OER Policy is just one of a sweet of open policies for teaching and learning that the University shares under Creative Commons licence, and we were delighted when these policies were awarded Open Education Global’s
Open Policy Award
as part of their 2021 Awards for Excellence.  Edinburgh rather swept the boards at the awards, also winning the
Open Curation Award
for our collection of OERs on
TES Resources
, co-created by GeoScience Outreach undergraduates and our fabulous Open Content Curation interns.  Melissa Highton won the
Open Leadership Award
, and Wikimedia intern Hannah Rothman won the
Open Student Award
.  We didn’t win the Open Resilience Award, but Charlie and I made a very cool video for our entry so I’m sharing it here anyway 🙂
ALT, Wikimedia UK, Creative Commons
I’ve continued serving as a trustee for
ALT
and
Wikimedia UK
and it’s always an honour to give something back to both these organisations, given their ongoing commitment to  openness, equity, community engagement and knowledge activism. This year I was privileged to sit on the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards panel, which is always an inspiring experience, and the recruitment panel for the new ALT CIO. I also stepped briefly into the role of interim Chair of Board for Wikimedia UK, when Nick Poole’s term came to an end and before our new chair Monisha Shah took up the role.  With my Wikimedia UK hat on, I contributed to the Creative Commons working group on the ethics of open sharing, chaired by Josie Fraser.  You can read the outputs and recommendations of this working group here:
Beyond Copyright: the Ethics of Open Sharing
Knowledge Activism
I made my own small contribution to knowledge activism at the beginning of the year, when the University’s Disabled Staff Network and Staff Pride Network decided to run an editathon for LGBT History Month, I suggested HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland as a topic. As a result of the HIV Scotland Editathon, six new articles were created and several others improved, making a significant contribution to representing the history of
HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland
on Wikipedia.  I created a new article about
Scottish AIDS Monitor
and I also wrote and article about
Jill Nalder
, the Welsh actress who inspired the character of Jill in Russel T. Davis’ drama
Its a Sin
. Later in the year,
Gary Needham
invited me to present a webinar on
Knowledge Activism: Representing the History of HIV and AIDS activism on Wikipedia
for the University of Liverpool’s School of the Arts.  Gary and I have a formative shared queer history that goes back many years, so it really meant a lot to me to be able to speak to him and his colleagues about the challenges of representing queer lives and experiences in this way.
A different kind of knowledge activism was provoked by the BBC drama series
Vigil
which opened with distressing scenes of a fishing trawler being sunk by a nuclear submarine off the West Coast of Scotland.  I certainly wasn’t the only one who noted similarities to the sinking of the fishing vessel
Antares
by hunter killer submarine HMS
Trenchant
off Arran in 1990, despite the BBC denying that the incident was based on any specific real life event.  At the time, there was no Wikipedia entry about the sinking of the
Antares
and
HMS
Trenchant
‘s entry made only a veiled reference to the incident, so I fixed that.  It’s important that we remember tragedies like this and equally important that we remember who was responsible.
And while we’re on the subject of activism and loss of life at sea, please consider supporting the
Royal National Lifeboat Institution
if you can.  Their volunteers risk their own lives to save those who find themselves in peril at sea, and they are facing increasing hostility and abuse for their selfless courage and humanity.
COP26
Activism of a different kind was going on all over Glasgow in November to coincide with COP26.  I can’t say I’m hugely optimistic about the outcomes of the conference or the will of global leaders and developed nations to enact meaningful change to halt the climate crisis, however it was hugely inspiring to hear the voices of so many young indigenous community activists.  These are the radical voices we need to listen to and make space for.  Also kudos to my daughter for snapping what surely has to be the most accurate photograph of the conference and the crisis we face, when we joined the climate march through Glasgow on 7 November.
COP26 Climate Crisis March, Glasgow, CC BY NC SA, Rhuna McCartney
Open Scotland
Another area where we’ve made less progress than I would have hoped is with
Open Scotland
.  As a purely voluntary initiative Open Scotland hasn’t been particularly active for a number of years now, but many of those involved are still supporting open education, open practice and OER through other initiatives and activities. We remain committed to the aims of the
Scottish Open Education Declaration
and we haven’t given up hope that one day, the Scottish Government will wake up to the benefits and affordances of sharing publicly funded educational resources under open licence.  In March this year, with support from Creative Commons, we made another attempt at engaging the Cabinet Secretary for Education with the the UNESCO Recommendation on OER and the Scottish Open Education Declaration, but again we were disappointed to receive a generic response from a civil servant.  At a time when inclusive and equitable access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities has never been more important, Scottish Government’s continued failure to engage with open education and OER is disappointing to say the least.
Hello Helo
On a more positive note, we got a new kitten this year.  This is Helo and he behaves more like a puppy than a cat.  He’s very cute, but he’s also an absolute menace.  My two long suffering adult cats are getting no peace.
Helo, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
I got home to the Hebrides in the summer for the first time in two years.  It was a joy to see family again and when I finally got to the beach (yes,
that
beach) I felt like I could breath again for the first time in months.
Traigh na Berie, Isle of Lewis, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
Hope
In what has been a difficult and challenging year on many levels, I’ve been privileged to continue working with so many kind, compassionate, fierce and committed open education practitioners and open knowledge advocates.  You give me hope.
It seems fitting to end with a quote from the late, great bell hooks, whose courage and clarity touched so many and whose words provide hope for us all.
“My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.”
~ bell hooks (1952 – 2021)
Earlier this week I had the very great pleasure of joining my colleagues Myles Blaney and Michael Gallagher for their fabulous
M&M Podcast
to talk about knowledge equity.  I’m a big fan of the M&M Podcast and knowledge equity is a topic that is very close to my heart so I really enjoyed the experience.
In a packed, half-hour conversation we covered everything from what knowledge equity means, improving knowledge equity through open education and co-creation, gatekeeping in open spaces, the impact of algorithmic bias, power, privilege and unconscious bias, learning from other cultures and knowledge structures, and what practical steps institutions can take to improve knowledge equity and inclusion.
We also went off at a few tangents to talk about COVID vaccines, the historical repression of knowledge equity, how history is constructed and taught, acknowledging the legacy of Scotland’s colonial past, and confusing the twitter algorithm.
You can listen to the podcast here –
M&M Podcast 24: The one where we talk with Lorna Campbell
, and like all good things, it’s open licensed of course!
This is a transcript of a talk I gave for the University of Liverpool School of the Arts “
Making a difference in the real world
” series.
My name is Lorna Campbell, I’m a learning technology service manager at the University of Edinburgh and I’m also a Trustee of Wikimedia UK, and today I’m going to be talking about Wikipedia as a site of knowledge activism, the representation of queer and marginalised histories on the encyclopedia, and particularly the history of HIV and AIDS activism.  And I’ll also be introducing some of the people who have inspired me on my own journey to becoming a knowledge activist.
Slides are available here:
Knowledge Activism
First of all I’d like to start with a few acknowledgements.  I know acknowledgements usually come at the end, but as I’m going to be talking about the work of colleagues whose knowledge activism has been deeply inspirational to me, I want to speak their names up front.  So I’d like to thank
Áine Kavanagh, Reproductive BioMedicine graduate, University of Edinburgh.
Prof Allison Littlejohn, Director, UCL Knowledge Lab & Dr Nina Hood, University of Aukland.
Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh.
Tara Robertson, Tara Robertson Consulting.
Tomas Sanders, History graduate, University of Edinburgh.
Sara Thomas, Scotland Projects Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.
Wikimedia UK
is the UK chapter of the
Wikimedia Foundation
, the international not-for-profit organisation that supports the Wikimedia projects, of which Wikipedia is the best known.  Wikimedia’s vision is to imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.  This is not just a statement it’s a promise of inclusivity.
Wikipedia itself needs little introduction, the free encyclopaedia is the fifth most visited site on the internet, with over 6 billion monthly visitors.  English Wikipedia alone has over 6 million articles and there are an estimated 52 million articles in 309 languages supported by the site as a whole.
Wikipedia is not just a repository of knowledge in its own right, it’s also a source of information for others services such as Google, whose 92 billion visits per month dwarfs Wikipedia’s paltry 6 billion. Amazon Alexa also draws much of its information from Wikipedia. Whenever you ask Alexa a question, there’s a good chance that the answer will come from Wikipedia.
In the global knowledge economy, knowledge is power, and Wikipedia is the largest repository of free, open and transparent information in the world.  Consequently, it’s perhaps no surprise that Wikipedia is censored to various degrees by numerous countries and regimes throughout the world, and outright banned by several including Myanmar, China, and Turkey.
Having access to a platform where we can all access reliable, high quality information for free has never been more important in this age of disinformation, fake news, and government sanctioned culture wars.  How information is created and consumed matters like never before, and understanding how knowledge is created on Wikipedia can help people to understand how they consume and reproduce information.
Continue reading
LGBT History month is almost over but before the month draws to a close I want to highlight the brilliant work of the HIV Scotland Wikpedia editathon that took place at the end of January.  The event was supported by the University’s indefatigable
Wikimedian in Residence
, Ewan McAndrew, and organised by the University’s Disabled Staff Network and Staff Pride Network, who were keen to run another editathon following the success of their previous Pride editathon on
LGBT+ Books in Scotland and Beyond
.  (I’m proud to have created a page for the controversial lesbian magazine
Quim
as part of that event.)  I suggested HIV / AIDS activism in Scotland as a potential topic as I’d noticed previously that this important history was almost entirely missing from the encyclopaedia.  Scottish AIDS Monitor and PHACE West had no articles at all, and although an article already existed for
Derek Ogg
, it only touched on his legal career and made no mention of his prominent AIDS activism.  This omission was all the more glaring in light of the belated public conversation about the impact of the AIDS pandemic sparked by the broadcast of Russell T Davis’ series
It’s a Sin
.  The Network were keen to address this omission and
HIV Scotland
also came on board to support the event, and I’m pleased to say that six new articles were created and several others improved. You can find out more about the articles created on the event dashboard here:
HIV Scotland Editathon
As part of the event, I wrote an article about
Scottish AIDS Monitor
, an organisation I first came into contact with in 1992 at an event at the Tramway which coincided with their seminal exhibition
Read My Lips: New York AIDS Polemics.
That event and exhibition, which featured works by Gran Fury, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Felix Gonzalez-Torress and others, left a huge impression on me.  I was aware of the AIDS pandemic, growing up in the 1980s it was impossible to ignore, even in the Outer Hebrides. Who could forget the stigmatising horror of the Don’t Die of Ignorance campaign?  But it was
Read My Lips
that really brought home to me the deeply personal impact of all those lost lives, the fight for justice and recognition, and the importance of organisations like SAM in raising awareness, providing support and promoting safe sex.
Read My Lips: New York AIDS Polemics
Returning to
It’s a Sin
, the second article I wrote this month was a biography of
Jill Nalder
, the actress and activist who inspired the character of Jill Baxter and who played her mother in the series. I know that there has been some criticism of the series for stereotyping women as carers, and for centering the experiences of a woman whose own sexuality and relationships are elided from the show.  While there’s a discussion to be had there, I think it’s important to acknowledge the many many “ordinary” women who played an important role in awareness raising, fund raising, befriending and yes, caring for, people living with AIDS from the earliest years of the pandemic.
I still have a copy of the
Read My Lips
exhibition catalogue, which includes a transcript of
Vito Russo
‘s seminal speech,
Why We Fight
, from a 1988 ACT UP demonstration.  These lines really resonated with me.
“AIDS is really a test of us, as a people. When future generations ask what we did in this crisis, we’re going to have to tell them that we were out here today. And we have to leave the legacy to those generations of people who will come after us.
Someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes — when that day has come and gone, there’ll be people alive on this earth — gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white, who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and, in some cases, gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free.”
Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, with aspirations to provide “free access to the sum of all human knowledge”.   For this reason more than any other it’s critically important that the history of HIV and AIDS activism is represented on the encyclopaedia.  So that those generations that come after will be able understand the legacy and the courage of those who stood up and fought.
I’ve struggled for words this week, or rather I’ve struggled to know
whether
to speak. There are so many other voices that need to be heard and listened to right now, rather than another privileged white cis woman. I can’t help feeling that stepping aside and making space for these other voices is the most useful thing I can do. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that I am appalled, I am utterly horrified, by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of the white supremacist state that is the USA. I can’t even begin to imagine the rage and fury of Black people who live with this fear and injustice on a daily basis. So for most of the week, I’ve tried to use the small space I occupy online to amplify the voices of others, while trying to listen and learn from what they have to say.
At the same time I’m not so naïve to think that systemic racism and police brutality are problems that only afflict the US.  Witness the deaths
Joy Gardner
Cynthia Jarrett
Sean Rigg
Mark Duggan
, and Sheku Bayoh, whose death at the hands of police officers in Kirkaldy, is currently the subject of a Scottish Government
Public Enquiry
Racism is so ingrained in the social, historical and cultural fabric of Scotland and the UK that we barely even see it. I live in Glasgow, a city whose mercantile wealth was founded on the exploitation of Black bodies; the slaves who worked the plantations of the tobacco barons and sugar merchants. When we walk down Ingram Street, Glassford Street, Buchanan Street, we barely give a thought to the fact that these streets commemorate slave owners. Their mansions are now art galleries, bars, restaurants, designer clothes shops but nowhere in Glasgow is there a visible public memorial to the enslaved men, women and children whose lives and labour were exploited to build the wealth of the slave owners and their city. Scotland has a long, long way to go before it even begins to acknowledge its racist, colonial legacy.
Glasgow's slave trade past is all around us.
pic.twitter.com/D0ImzWzYWe
— BBC The Social (@bbcthesocial)
June 1, 2020
When universities, museums, art galleries and archives tweeted their support for #BlackLivesMatter this week they were, quite rightly, called out for their hypocrisy and performativity. After all, where is the evidence that black lives really
do
matter to these public institutions? Where is the evidence that they are addressing systemic racism, discrimination and inequality?
Something really bizarre about British universities, one after the other, issuing solidarity statements with protests against George Floyd's death. Why were they silent when similar things have happened right here? Or is it precisely that we're expected to believe they haven't?
— Priyamvada Gopal Justice For George Floyd NOW (@PriyamvadaGopal)
June 5, 2020
At the same time, the deluge of racist abuse that the University of Glasgow received for tweeting its support for #BlackLivesMatter shows why it’s so important that our education institutions do stand up to be counted.
UofG is appalled at the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. We stand together with the
@gusrc
and the entire UofG community in condemning all forms of racism and discrimination. We are committed to promoting equality across our community.
#BlackLivesMatter
#TeamUofG
pic.twitter.com/lvWiIiLZUk
— University of Glasgow (@UofGlasgow)
June 1, 2020
Ironically, Glasgow is currently the only university in Scotland that has made a concrete effort to address its historic legacy of profiting from slavery through its
Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow
report, its commitment to raise and pay £20million pounds in
reparations
and its MOU with the University of the West Indies to found a research centre to “stimulate public awareness about the history of slavery and its impact around the world.”
In its own
public statement
in response to the murder of George Floyd, the University of Edinburgh announced its intention to:
launch a community-led process of restorative and reparative justice, through which we will interrogate the role of the University in slavery and colonialism.
And furthermore to:
launch a cross-disciplinary hub, RACE.ED for research and teaching on race and ethnicity… to bring together academics and students to explore issues of racism and be part of a University network taking forward anti-racist initiatives within our University.
Because of course addressing historical racism is only part of the picture, we need to address the systemic racism and discrimination that still pervades our academic institutions. The University of Edinburgh Student Union’s
statement of solidarity
notes:
Across Scotland, Universities have a BME attainment gap of 8.9%, which rises to 24.5% for Black students (AdvanceHE, 2018) – at Edinburgh, the BME attainment gap is as high as 17.7% in some Schools (EDMARC, 2019a). The University’s own internal review of support for BME students in 2019 found that a lack of racial literacy among both staff and student fundamentally undermined the experiences of BME students at Edinburgh (UoE, 2019) – this is unsurprising in an educational environment where BME academic and professional services staff are less likely than white staff to be employed at higher grades (EDMARC, 2019b) and across the UK Black academics make up less than 1% of University lecturers (HESA, 2019).
And as Dr Jasmine Abrams succinctly put it:
Many of my Black friends and I have gotten messages from white colleagues asking about our well being and how they can help. Rather than burden us with your guilt, invite us to co-author papers and grants with you. Invite us to be on the symposium or be the guest speaker.
— Dr. Jasmine Abrams (@DrJasmineAbrams)
June 3, 2020
I don’t really know how to end this post, so I’m going to end it with the queer Black poet
Essex Hemphill
“It is easier to be angry than to hurt. Anger is what I do best. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. It is easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.”
As
#PRIDE2020
begins. ( Thread )
I would like to pay tribute to one of my most favourite Queer poets / activists Essex Hemphill.
Essex Hemphill 1957 – 1995
“ Hemphill spoke to the black gay experience, and a quest to make himself heard “
pic.twitter.com/Rwvbny4UO8
— JohnPaul (@JPJaval)
June 1, 2020
Please donate if you can. There is a list of bail funds
here
, and a list of UK organisations fighting racism and injustice at the end of the EUSA statement
here
In my post about my
Open World femedtech
quilt square I explained why I chose to make my square out of Harris Tweed, a protected fabric that is only made in the Outer Hebrides where I was born and brought up. In many ways the fabric is emblematic of both the islands and the islanders; the wool is shorn from the local black face sheep, the colours, traditionally from natural dyes, reflect the colours of the landscape, and the cloth is woven by hand to produce a fabric that is unique, beautiful and hard wearing.  As with many traditional fabrics, tweed production was originally a communal activity, and much of the work was undertaken by women; from dyeing and spinning the wool, to weaving the tweed, to waulking and finishing the cloth.  Waulking involved soaking and beating the tweed to remove dirt and impurities, and soften and shrink the cloth. Before tweed mills were built in the islands to process the hand-woven cloth, finishing a tweed was a social activity as much as a collective task.
This following account of the importance of waulking as a women’s social activity, comes from a Gaelic radio programme called Tigh Mo Sheanair (My Grandfather’s House) which was recorded in the early 1970s and the speaker is my grandmother, Anne Campbell, who was born in 1909 and lived in Harris all her life.  Her words were translated from the Gaelic by her daughter, my aunt.
Anne Campbell & Sybil McInnes
“The entertainment whilst waulking the tweed was better than a wedding, for us anyway when we were young, especially if the waulking took place in the evening.  If the waulking was in the morning we had to come home afterwards and stay in in the evening.  Waulking was sometimes our only entertainment.  We were always delighted when we got news that someone in the village was about to complete a tweed.  In those days it was the women who wove the tweed on the “little loom”.  A tweed would take three weeks to complete – today a tweed is completed in one day using an automatic loom.
To waulk the tweed a long table was set out with seating for four women on each side.  There was a tub at either end of the table. The tweed was cut into two pieces and a piece dropped in each tub.  One side worked left the right and the other right to left.
For a bit of fun the loose coloured threads at the end of the tweed were cut and each woman would put her thread outside the door. If your thread was the first one then the first man who came to the house had to see you home that evening.  It did not matter if you had a steady boyfriend, it was who ever found your thread that had to take you home.  There was often good-natured bantering outside the house especially if your own boyfriend turned up expecting to walk you home. We didn’t think anything of being up all night if there was a waulking.”
Although my granny wasn’t a weaver, she did spin and dye her own wool, which she used to knit socks, jerseys and other garments.  When I was a child, there was a huge cast iron cauldron wedged in the rocks outside the house, which had been used for dying wool before modern conveniences came along.  The remains are still there today.
This communal aspect of fabric production, sewing, embroidering, and quilting has always been important.  It provides women with a space where, to some extent, they are in control of their own labour. A space where they can come together to share their skill, pass on their craft, tell their stories, and enjoy each other’s company.  These spaces sometimes seem to stand outside the strictures and expectations of “normal” society, and provide women with a space where they set their own rules.   To my mind this has been the most powerful aspect of the femedtech quilt project, which has given so many women from all over the world, a space to collaborate, to share their skills, their stories, their inspiration and their creativity.
I’m writing this post with Frances and Suzanne in mind who will be coming together this weekend to sew the femedtechquilt, and although all those of us who sent in squares won’t be able to join them in person, I hope they’ll feel the strength of the threads that bind this amazing community together.
I was deeply saddened this morning to hear of the death of the author and artist Alasdair Gray, undoubtedly one of the most significant English-language authors of the last century. I have a strong personal connection to Gray’s writing as in some obscure way it’s bound up with my decision to come to study and live in Glasgow.
I first came across Gray’s writing in one of Penguin’s
Firebird
anthologies in the early 1980s, when I was about 14, then the following year my partner’s brother, who was studying Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University, came home with a copy of
Lanark
and gave it to me to read it. I was completely captivated by everything about the book and pestered my friends to read it, most of them did and were equally enthralled. (Dragonhide was a condition we recognised well.) After
Lanark
, I went on to
Unlikely Stories Mostly
and
1982 Janine
. I know
1982 Janine
is a divisive book, and I certainly read it at an impressionable age, but I still think it’s an incredibly powerful work, and one that comes frighteningly close to capturing the disorienting reality of mental breakdown in words and typography.
When I left school, I had hoped to go to Edinburgh to the School of Scottish Studies, but although I was successful in securing a place, the university didn’t offer me a place in halls, and, as I couldn’t afford to travel to Edinburgh to find a flat, I had to turn the place down. Instead I went to Glasgow, which offered me accommodation and a place to study Scottish Literature and Archaeology. I wasn’t exactly keen on going to Glasgow at first, but in an odd way it was through the writing of Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan, and an anthology of Glasgow poetry called
Noise and Smoky Breath
, that features Gray’s artwork of Cowcaddens on the cover, that I warmed to the idea of moving to the city. I say odd, because Gray’s vision of Glasgow in
Lanark
is very much a dystopian one, but it’s a very human dystopia.
When I first read
Lanark
in Stornoway as a teen, I had no real experience of Glasgow, it was a city I’d visited only once as a child, so re-reading the book at university while I was living in the city was a real eye-opener for me.   I saw Gray reading several times while I was a student, most notably at Felt Tipped Hosannas, a Mayfest event in 1990 to commemorate Edwin Morgan’s 70
th
birthday. He read an excerpt of
McGrotty and Ludmilla
and he was hilarious.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read
Lanark
since then, at least a dozen probably. It’s a book I go back to time and time again and every time I read it, it becomes more relevant.
It goes without saying that I love Gray’s art as much as his writing, as it’s really impossible to separate the two. For a short time, while I worked at Strathclyde University in the early 2000’s, we were privileged to share our Cetis office with some original prints of the
Lanark
illustrations from the University’s art collection.
I’ve lived in Glasgow for over 30 years now and somehow my experience of the city is still inextricably bound up with Gray’s work, whether it’s his artwork in Hillhead, Oran Mor, or The Chip, or his words that are woven into the fabric of the city.
“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”
“Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”
Lanark
~ Alasdair Gray
As an eighteen year old teenager from the Outer Hebrides, I was able to imagine living in Glasgow because I had already visited it through Gray’s art, and never once have I felt like a stranger here.
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