Jennifer Geigel Mikulay discusses the use of wikis in university coursework

Summary
Preservapedia intern Stephanie Byrd interviews Alverno College professor Jennifer Geigel Mikulay on her use of Wiki-based assignments in university coursework and the WikiProject Wiki Makes Video.

The interview was recorded, by telephone, on July, 9, 2013 with permission to release the interview into the public domain. The interview is posted as a part of the WikiProject Preservation Education.

Interview transcription
Byrd: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Preservapedia Talks. My name is Stephanie Byrd and today I'm talking with Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, a Media Studies professor at Alverno College.

Welcome Jennifer!

Mikulay: Thanks, Stephanie. It's great to be here.

Byrd: Now, Jennifer, can you describe the WikiProject Wiki Makes Video for our listeners?

Mikulay: Sure. I think most of your listeners probably know about Wikipedia, the web-based encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers. Just a few statistics about the encyclopedia: it started in 2001 and now it has more than 4 million entries in English, and there's also about 285 different language editions that together serve over half a billion people who visit the website seeking information each month.

The community of volunteers that creates all of the content is fairly loosely organized, but one of the formal structures that we have to support our work is what's called a WikiProject. The WikiProjects essentially provide a communication structure to support our efforts to improve areas of the encyclopedia, and these WikiProjects relate to all kinds of subjects. So this one for video just focuses on video, and the project was originally created just recently in 2010 and then it's kind of been reenergized recently this spring through the effort of my students and some collaborators. It's really the only WikiProject that's dealing with creating video for the encyclopedia and so far our focus has been on adding videos that relate to subjects like architecture, dance, food, machines, parks, politics, sports, and wildlife - subjects that lend themselves to moving images. My own work with my students at Alverno has focused the videos on cultural heritage subjects.

Byrd: How do you feel these video submissions have added to the articles and people's understanding of the content?

Mikulay: I think the videos really add a lot. Other encyclopedias that have moved online, like Britannica, make extensive use of multimedia to support understanding of content, but Wikipedia has kind of lagged behind until recently.

According to a recent analysis that Ward Cunningham did this spring, fewer than 1% of Wikipedia articles are currently illustrated with video, even though it's been possible, technically, to add video since 2007. So participants in Wiki Makes Video are focusing first on subjects that can really be enhanced by access to moving images and sound, and then we try to place the video in a prominent location on the article page so people can see it right away.

The videos my students are producing and contributing focus on cultural heritage and illustrate ideas that are described directly in the text of the articles. We create our videos specifically to illustrate the content of the articles, and we often choose subjects that can be hard to describe in words. For example, I have a student named Mai Kaw Xiong who created a video of people breakdancing, and that allows people who visit the Wikipedia article on b-boying to very easily understand what it means to have people moving their bodies in that way.

Byrd: Your focus on heritage is really interesting. What role do projects like these have in historic preservation or the heritage conservation fields?

Mikulay: That's something that's really emerging now, so I'm glad that you asked about it.

Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website in the world right now, so any content shared there is accessible to a very diverse audience, many of whom will find their way to our videos because they care about the subjects that we're featuring. When we think about the heritage preservation field, I think we most often will think about established institutions and trained professionals, but projects like Wikipedia that use crowd-sourcing and share user-generated content can demonstrate that a much wider community is actually involved with heritage preservation.

My students are using their new media skills to share cultural heritage knowledge on a very accessible platform with a massive scale, and they're often serving diverse audiences whose interests are not routinely reflected in the local institutional exhibition and preservation activity. For example, I had a student named Lynda Diaz who made a video about the practice of making henna tattoos and another student named Thuy Tran who made a video to demonstrate the preparation of a Vietnamese spring roll, and these videos are viewed hundreds of times a day, including in the non-English language editions of the encyclopedia. They're really reaching a lot of people, and those subjects might not find their way to be expressed in the major institutions in Milwaukee.

I think that Wiki Makes Video also serves the heritage preservation field by documenting and depicting culture in action, by sharing videos with a very broad and diverse audience that cares about heritage, and then the videos themselves become an archive that indexes the cultural interests that people have today. All of these qualities of video have attracted interest from leading institutions in historic preservation, including the Smithsonian and the National Archives, both of these institutions now have staff dedicated to working with Wikipedia. They haven't focused their efforts too much on video, to date, but we're really optimistic that with new technical support online with Wikipedia that it's going to be easier for these larger institutions to make video content contributions.

Byrd: Let's talk about your students for a second, what skills did your students develop throughout this project?

Mikulay: At Alverno College we have a unique ability-based curriculum, and we don't have grades, so we're very specific and concrete with the skills that students are developing as they're creating these videos for Wikipedia. Some of the things we work on are problem-solving, the aesthetics, how they make decisions and how they express their values in the videos, and then we also, of course, are dealing with advanced communication skills. Visual literacy is a big part of this, as well, and the students are involved with creating narrative structures for the videos using storyboards. And they also learn some of the basic, professional video production techniques.

So it's really a pretty wide range of skills.

Byrd: In future classes, will you continue to have Wiki-based assignments?

Mikulay: Yes, definitely. I find Wikipedia to be an unending resource for teaching and learning. I also really like that by contributing to Wikipedia, students are developing habits that they're going to need through their careers, things like sharing knowledge openly, collaborating in a generous way, it really helps them to value the opportunity that they're getting through their higher education experience. Another reason I'm so committed to using Wiki-based assignments in that students really appreciate sharing their work with the diverse audience that goes to Wikipedia, and they also really like the feedback.

I started using Wikipedia when I was teaching in a graduate program in museum studies in 2008, and then at Alverno I work primarily with undergraduate communication students, and I've been using it with them since 2011. I’m really committed to using these kinds of projects.

I've seen the graduate students excel with sharing research and improving citations in existing Wikipedia articles. They're also usually able to create well-written and thoroughly referenced articles from scratch. At the undergraduate level, Wikipedia serves as a tool for teaching media literacy. My Alverno students have excelled at developing content related to their own interests and communities. Their interest in web video and their access to a range of heritage traditions translates really well to Wikipedia.

There's also kind of a learning curve for this, for listeners who might be involved with education or with heritage preservation and might want to be thinking about wading into Wikipedia, but the Wikimedia Foundation has a lot of really helpful resources for new-comers. There’s a growing movement of GLAM organizations - galleries, libraries, archives and museums - these cultural organizations are becoming increasingly involved with Wiki work, and it's kind of an exciting and welcoming time for people to get involved.

Byrd: A really large component of this assignment seems to have been the students engaging other Wiki users, what kind of feedback were your students getting? Was it more academic or professional?

Mikulay: They're getting both. They get direct feedback from me and from their peers in the academic context. They also get feedback in a professional context from the Wikipedia community and users of the encyclopedia, some of whom are subject experts.

One form of external feedback they really enjoy relates to analytics. Wikipedia keeps detailed statistics on the viewership of the articles and provides a variety of tools for accessing and analyzing this data. So, with the analytic tools, students can see on a day-to-day basis how their work is being used. Looking at analytics also helps me, as an educator, to prompt my students to consider issues like how social media is guiding our attention or how persistent inequities related to race and gender might influence interest in certain subjects.

It's really interesting to see in the feedback they get through the analytics that the students are often surprised by the popularity of their videos. One example is a student of mine named Katy Lederer who noticed, when she was trying to choose a subject for her video, that the Milwaukee Art Museum lacked a video even though it has this incredible kinetic architecture, so she went to the museum over a series of weeks and created this really intricate time lapse of the kinetic structure that Santiago Calatrava designed for the museum. That video, since she posted it to the article on Wikipedia, has been viewed about 3,000 times, so that's been really thrilling for her.

The students also enjoy getting direct feedback from Wikipedians. Sometimes an editor will leave an appreciative note for them on their user page or on the page where the video lives, and they also have gotten more conversational feedback and support through a community space for novice editors that’s called the Teahouse. Teahouse was actually developed by a museum studies graduate student who I worked with named Sarah Stierch, and it's intended to be a place where students or other new-comers to the encyclopedia can bounce around ideas or get advice and support, or celebrate their contributions. The feedback that students can get in the Wikipedia environment is really rich.

Byrd: Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mikulay: You're welcome.

Byrd: And for our listeners, if you would like to learn more about Preservapedia, please visit our website at Preservapedia.org.