The Auricle

by Derek Morrison, 21 October 2008

Zoe Corbyn’s article By the blog: academics tread carefully (Times Higher Education, 9 October 2008) was a good broad sweep of scholarly blogging and has generated some interesting commentary. Brian Kelly from JISC/MLA’s Web Focus service had referred Zoe to me as one example of a long term HE blogger. I offered Zoe some of my thoughts one of which, once processed via her medium’s editorial process, came out as:

While he acknowledges that some universities can appear overly sensitive to blog posts, he says academics can’t expect to be given free rein. “The simple rule for everyone should be ‘don’t affect the share price’, no matter what technology you are using,” he comments.

Lest anybody think that I’ve made a sudden swtich to the represssive right 🙂 the “don’t affect the share price” quotation should be read in the context of two of my earlier Auricle postings.

First, way back in 2005 in my article Collective Intelligence in a Corporate Higher Education Setting? (Auricle, 30 November, 2005) I cited several examples of how even big name corporates had embraced the blog model and encouraged its employees to communicate directly with the public, e.g.

Let’s consider one corporate example. Perhaps the most interesting of the corporate weblogs is Sun Microsystems not so much for the content (at least in the context of this Auricle posting) but for the Sun Policy on Public Discourse publicly displayed on their employee weblog site. No apparent heavy hand here, merely the message not to affect the share price, don’t do anything illegal, and above all, don’t rubbish the company products or services. All-in-all, that appears pretty reasonable and Sun at least seems to be demonstrating confidence and trust in their employees.

Second, in an even earlier article I again considered the unexpected consequences of new technologies on an institution’s preferred projected messages E-learning industrialization – will the ‘customers’ like it? (Auricle, 13 November 2005).

I first started the blog called Auricle in 2004 where I was the Director of the then Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning at the at the University of Bath. My purpose in starting Auricle was to assess the potential value of the technology, not vicariously, but by gaining actual experience by becoming a blogger. As long-term Auricle readers will know I used this vehicle to reflect on a number of issues including the risks of equating e-learning with the passive provision of technical infrastructure such as an institution-hosted Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Such a viewpoint is much less contentious in 2008 than it was in 2004 when “MLE+VLE=E” was the focus of much institutional investment and thinking. The point in mentioning this is that the University of Bath generously hosted the original Auricle blog and gave me free rein to reflect and write on e-learning matters. I assume, however, had I used Auricle to launch a polemic on my own or other institution’s policies or personnel flying under a banner of “academic freedom” then I would have been ‘invited’ to reflect and write elsewhere. Such actions could have been interpreted as a misuse of the freedom given to me if it was perceived as having negative impact on the brand image or “share price” and so could have held back the more general uptake of the technology which was the goal. So kudos to Bath, Warwick et al for taking the enlightened view.

That doesn’t mean that academic/scholarly oriented blogs should not be able to tackle difficult issues, it’s just I think judicious use of public-facing communication tools such as blogs, wikis, and social networking sites can influence policies and practice for the better. Such influence is unlikely as long as such tools are perceived as a threat to the “share price” as this will simply reinforce the position of those in institutions who would prefer that all public facing information be ‘filtered’; in that case we will all end up with “safe” and bland institution sites devoid of any dynamism or uniqueness and which serve only to mark the institution’s spot on the virtual tree.

I would like to think that by this time every HE-oriented institution ought to have sufficient confidence in their staff to be making direct communication tools such as blogs, wikis etc available provision and to be using their digital literacy development programmes for staff and students to negotiate boundaries (you do have these don’t you?). Concerned about losing control? Concerned about disgruntled employees or students sending out the wrong “message”? My advice?; again read my 2005 blog postings and relax a little. There are so many direct and indirect communication possibilities that such inhibitory policies are more likely to be counter-productive and could easily stimulate the very behaviour it is assumed they will prevent. Attempting to “punish” such employees or students risks simply escalating and scaling the original cause of the disgruntlement to a point that a multiple media magnifying glass descends and the original issue disappears into a maelstrom that sucks in all in its path.

But even assuming enlightened institutional policies and provision of direct communication tools like blogs there is undoubted scepticism and sometimes outright rejection of such tools by academic staff. Again, here lies the importance of the digital literacy and development programmes which can demonstrate the potential and offer examples of such technologies in use.

I think, however, as part of such digital literacy programmes it is important to continue to differentiate the blog from other web communications tools like wikis. The unique characteristic of the blog posting is that it always has a primary information owner, i.e. it is one author who is asserting a point of view or providing a piece of information. Others may well comment, but always in the context of the primary piece. That makes it similar to the position paper or single author journal article.

I always find it interesting when colleagues say they are put off by the “blogging culture” which they perceive as producing results of irrelevant or poor scholarly value. From my perspective, the so called “blogging culture” is what you make it. The blog engine is simply an example of a fairly efficient and easily maintainable online publication tool; the applications and manifestations of that tool are up to a user or community-of-users to create. I use Auricle as a vehicle for testing and rehearsing ideas and because I know it will be published in the public domain I try to create postings that will be of some value to those in the communities who read them. Sometimes I repurpose what I have ‘published’ on Auricle for, say, conference papers and sometimes it is the conference paper which becomes the subject of the posting.

But I also think it would be counterproductive to promote blogs as the solution but instead it is another possibly useful tool for the academic/scholar who wishes to disseminate information or publish online using a tool which identifies them as the information owner. Much as I do with the various Higher Education Academy blogs I (and others) service, a course tutor could do very much the same for his students; as could the members of a research group.

Of course what needs to be considered also is that academic culture traditionally perceives value in what has been published by traditional routes and has been subject to traditional peer review. In the context of UK HE that means publications that could possibly be counted as part of what was, until recently, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). There are no RAE points for blogs no matter how often they may be accessed and so what’s the incentive been for most Academics to invest time in such authorship? But adding recognised value to the learning and teaching experience? That could be a different thing and when academics see the value they add via blogs et al being recognised then they will engage. So it’s really a question of the value attributed to imaginative and effective learning and teaching activities rather than a specific technologies per se. Back to those digital literacy programmes you are all running (aren’t you?)

Unlike Auricle, however, we should remember that much blogging and similar activity is likely to be hidden from public view. University firewalls and blogs/wikis integrated into MLE/VLEs mean that we will never be aware of their existence. We should also remember the “Hidden Learning Environment” which lies outside of institutional provision and so makes it easy to use a blog engine or other tool/service situated outside of an institution to support a knowledge or subject community (or subset thereof).

I do find it very interesting that even now it’s perfectly possible that two institutions within easy access of each other may have completely divergent IT policies regarding blogs et al. One institution may treat blogs with deep suspicion and placing considerable barriers to their use because the spectre of negative impact on their ‘brand’ arising from unapproved public commentary by their staff. Other institutions don’t appear to have such concerns and actually provide such vehicles for communication for their staff, e.g. Warwick blogs. Again, this simply demonstrates to me that we still have a bit of work to do in conveying the message that it’s not the tools that need to be the focus of institution policy makers but the development of sensible Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs), al la Harvard Law. Blogs don’t have any more inherent magic or evil powers than say a telephone or email so I’m always amused by attempted strictures on particular technologies. Hence arose my simple rule for every potential user “Don’t affect the share price” no matter what technology you are using, e.g. telephone, email, snail mail, blog, or wiki and again my advice to institutions is “relax a little” and focus on negotiated development of the AUPs with your staff and students.

I would like to finish with a “blast from the past”, an example of institutional over-reaction which attracted global attention via the blogosphere but eventually appeared to result in a satisfactory agreement. You will find reference to this in a 2004 Auricle posting: Use the approved Course Management System – or else! (Auricle, 2 November 2004) and Use the approved Course Management System – or else! (continued) (Auricle, 12 November 2004). It appears that James Farmer, the subject of the Auricle posting, has since moved on. He has since founded Edublogs which has become a sizeable blog hosting service dedicated to the international educational domain. It’s energetic innovators like James that the education world needs and in that 2004 posting he chose to share his bewilderment with the rest of us. We should all have learned something from his experience.