In 2019, the students focused on famous Irish sportspeople. As a number of these people competed in the Olympic Games of the early twentieth century, the students were confronted with periods in history where Irish people competed first under the British flag, followed by a period in which Irish athletes were forced to participate as part of the British team with some bringing their own Irish flags to fly in protest, and finally a period after Irish independence during which some Irish nationalistic athletic associations refused to allow their members to participate in the Olympic Games at all. This engagement with the historical record provides a new and more nuanced way for students to engage with issues of identity, nationhood, and representation through the individual experiences of those from a tumultuous period in Irish history.
Students also encountered the o en-frustrating lack of source material regarding the history of women in many walks of life, from politics to science. They discovered that women’s biographic entries in works like the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) are subentries in articles about their fathers, brothers, or husbands rather than entries in their own right. One example was the Olympic fencer Shirley Armstrong, whose husband’s entry in the DIB barely makes mention of her, despite her being only one of two Irish women selected to take part in the 1960 Rome Olympics and her long and storied career as a fencer and trainer. Encountering these issues themselves, rather than having them explained as an abstract idea through a lecture, makes the challenges around representation more tangible for students.
By teaching the next generation the importance of verifiable and reliable information sources, we are not only fostering good digital citizenship but we are also equipping students with the critical tools to find, assess, and analyze sources and facts. While these skills can be fostered through lectures and information seeking and evaluation exercises, Wikipedia offers a unique peer-review environment in which the students have their additions to articles quickly accepted or rejected by the community. By experiencing the sometimes highly exacting demands of fellow editors to adhere to Wikipedia editing guidelines and policies, students are exposed to an assessment of their work unlike anything
