The Auricle E-Learning Blog

The e-learning team at the University of Bath was one of the early adopters of blog technologies to provide a forum for reflecting on e-learning in a Web content.   The blog was set up by Derek Morrison when he was head of the e-learning unit. Derek had an interest in exploring the potential of new technologies, with one example of this being the series of podcast interviews he recording and made available on the blog back in 2005.  This included an interview with John Dale about the innovative blogging service developed at the University of Warwick (the first large scale student blogging service in the UK)  and, perhaps not as noteworthy, an interview with me on my reflections of the WWW 2005 conference.

The name of the e-learning team’s blog was Auricle, which has an advantage of being a very Google-friendly name, and a Google search for “Auricle Bath” finds links to the blog itself and various page which refer to the blog. Unfortunately it seems that the blog no longer exists – following a link to the blog’s home page gets a 404 error message:

The web address http://www.bath.ac.uk/dacs/cdntl/pMachine/morriblog.php was not found. It may have moved, or it may no longer be available.

How unfortunate – all that potentially valuable historical content giving views on the potential of the Web (including technologies such as blogs and podcasts) to enhance the quality of the student’s learning experiences now no longer available.  And how should the University of Bath feel about this loss of its intellectual endeavours and the role that the University had in being one of the early adopters of blogs by an e-learning team.

Why Did The Blog Disappear?

The URL for the Auricle blog provides an indication of some of the reasons for the disappearance of the blog: dacs refers to the Division of Access and Continuing Studies and cdntl to the Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning – but neither of these departments still exists.  Following staff departures and organisational changes, support for learning at the University of now provided by the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office (LTEO)  with the e-Learning Team having responsibility for managing and supporting e-learning developments.

In addition to these organisational changes, the pMachine part of the blog’s domain name refers to the pMachine blog engine and morriblog clearly refers to  Derek Morrison, who left the University a number of years ago to support the HE Academy’s Pathfinder programme.

It is perhaps not surprising that following such changes and the influx of a large number of new staff in the e-Learning Team that the Auricle blog got lost somewhere along the way!

Can We Retrieve Any Of The Resources?

Is it possible to retrieve any of the blog posts and related resources? Is it possible to obtain any details about the blog, such as when it was launched, the number of posts published during its lifetime, how popular it was and, perhaps, the impact that the blog may have had?

Since the blog was public, as opposed to a blog which was restricted to members of the University of Bath, the contents of the blog have been indexed by Google. And using a combination of search terms, such as “Auricle Bath”, it is also possible to discover Web resources which cite the Auricle blog. This helped me to find a blog post on Stephen Downes’s blog on The Weblog as the Model for a New Type of Virtual Learning Environment? in which Stephen (a high profile Canadian e-learning guru)  clearly acknowledged the importance of Derek Morrison’s views on the potential of the blog as providing “the basis for a distributed, not centralised, information and learning object system“:

The author of Auricle nails it. “In the weblog, however, the announcements, articles, stories are the raison d’etre’ so much so that, not satisfied to present articles from one source, the weblog has the temerity, due to the adoption of the RSS standard, to receive syndicated stories from other sources and, in turn, offer it’s own portfolio of articles for use by others. For example, a blog supporting a programme or module could be the vehicle by which faculty post date and time-stamped short articles relevant to the course but which also link to related, but distributed, learning resources which are presented via RSS feeds. Such feeds can be static or dynamic so that updated RSS formatted information will be reflected in whatever application is displaying it, e.g. a la Auricle’s RSS Dispenser. Here then is the basis for a distributed, not centralised, information and learning object system.” (My emphasis) Derek Morrison, Auricle, February 27, 2004.

And the date of Stephen’s post (27 February 2004) indicates that the Auricle blog was available in early 2004.

With some further use of Google I discover that the Auricle podcast resources are still available on the University of Bath Web site – and I’m pleased that the MP3 file of my interview has not been lost. The RSS file also contains the publication dates, which show that the podcasts were published during 2005. We seem to have unearthed some further information about the Auricle blog.

Rediscovering The Blog!

It required a Google search for “Auricle Morrison” for me to discover that the Auricle blog is alive and well! It is now hosted at http://www.auricle.org/auriclewp/ (much better than the original URI!).  And as well as providing access to the original posts (although with a new look-and-feel, as the blog is now based on the WordPress blog software)  the blog is still active, with Derek using the blog to support his Pathfinder work at the HE Academy. As Chris Rusbridge pointed out on a post on “Digital Preservation” term considered harmful?” on the Digital Curation blog “phrases like “long term accessibility” or “usability over time” are better than the process-oriented phrase “digital preservation“. And here’s an example of how the Auricle blog has been preserved by continuing to still be used and accessible to its user community.

The Lessons

What are the implications of this case study for the wider community? And what lessons can be learnt?

We should be aware of the dangers of associating services with departmental names and specific technologies. This has been well documented, including Tim Berners-Lee’s article on “Cool URIs Don’t Change!” – although this is clearly easy to say, but more difficult to implement in practice.

I feel there is also a need for departments to audit their networked services and to document their policies regarding the sustainability of such services.  And such documented policies should be examined when departments change their names or there are significant changes in personnel.

And this case study provides an interesting example of a service which has been driven by an individual – Derek Morrison. As Derek clearly felt ownership to the Auricle blog, he was motivated to migrate the content of the blog to a new platform and, at a later date, to continue to contribute to the blog, although not as frequently as previously.  This probably saves the e-Learning Team at Bath from having to retrieve backup copies of the blog posts and provide an archived copy of the resource.  But who owns the blog?  And what would have happened if there had been an ownership dispute over the blog and the name of the blog?  These are questions which will be relevant to many academics and support who make use of blogs to support their professional activities – including myself and my UK Web Focus blog. But as the contents of my blog have a Creative Commons licence I would hope that there will minimise any legal barriers to the contents of my blog being migrated to a new environment should circumstances change.

In a recent comment on this blog Kevin Ashley makes the point that having an interest in the preservation of Web resources doesn’t mean that one is anti-innovation. As Kevin points out “I see a distinction being made between preserving an experience and preserving the information which the experience makes available. Both are valid preservation approaches and both achieve different ends.

There’s a real difficulty, though, in applying either of these preservation approaches in a environment of rapid technological development. And within higher education we are likely to see examples of such innovation, whether this is scientific researchers involved in new ways of visualisating scientific data or teaching staff who wish to ensure students gain experiences in use of Social Web technologies.

How are such tensions to be addressed? Should, for example, use of immersive environments such as Second Life be banned until preservation techniques have been developed which will ensure that such complex environments can be preserved? Such a draconian approach is alien to the educational sector’s IT development culture (although such approaches are taken in other areas such as biological and medical research). And as I’ve described in a post on “Is Second Life Accessible?” innovative technologies such as Second Life can bring substantuial benefits to the user community – in this case a user with cerebral palsy who feels that Second Life provides a really useful tool for people who are unable to get around, who have problems of mobility in real life “because you can have friends without having to go out and physically find them“.

The tensions between preservation and innovation perhaps reflect similar tensions between accessibility and innovation, with differing opinions being held by the various interested parties. In the case of Second Life (where we are seeing virtual worlds being continually assembled, developed and then redeveloped) there does seem to be an awareness of the need to preserve such virtual worlds, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities having received funding from the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) for a two-year project on Preserving Virtual Worlds. And yet the $590,000 funding for this project, which will not, of course, guarantee that a solution to the problem with be available at the end of the funding, indicates that the preservation of immersive worlds will not be an easy undertaking.

Returning to Kevin’s comment that there is a “distinction [to be] made between preserving an experience and preserving the information which the experience makes available. Both are valid preservation approaches and both achieve different ends. perhaps it is important to focus on these distinctions when we are seeking to preserve our innovative services. Might the video clip of the Second Life experience be the appropriate solution for the pioneers of this technology until the research programmes have devised ways of preserving the much richer and resuable environment? And might not this be an approach which can also be taken for our innovative Web services?