The user is in control

Just a quick nod to Andy Powell’s post yesterday about Identity in a Web 2.0 World. As I’ve said before, I’m trying to catch up with the issues Andy discusses and develop them into a blueprint for the Mozilla/Creative Commons/P2P University Open Education course, I am participating in.

Andy writes:

…identity in a Web 2.0 world is not institution-centric, as manifest in the current UK Federation, nor is it based on the currently deployed education-specific identity and access management technologies.  Identity in a Web 2.0 world is user-centric – that means the user is in control…. The important point is that learners (and staff) will come into institutions with an existing identity, they will increasingly expect to use that identity while they are there (particularly in their use of services ‘outside’ the institution) and that they will continue using it after they have left.  As a community, we therefore have to understand what impact that has on our provision of services and the way we support learning and research.

I am therefore reassured that my blueprint outline is not completely off the wall:

University students are at least 18 years old and have spent many years unconsciously accumulating or deliberately developing a digital identity. When people enter university they are expected to accept a new digital identity, one which may rarely acknowledge and easily exploit their preceding experience and productivity. Students are given a new email address, a university ID, expected to submit course work using new, institutionally unique tools and develop a portfolio of work over three to four years which is set apart from their existing portfolio of work and often difficult to fully exploit after graduation. I think this will be increasingly questioned and resisted by individuals paying to study at university.

My proposal is to show there are existing technical solutions which would allow an individual to register as a student at a university, provide the institution with their Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, OpenID, etc. identification and from then on, the student uses their existing ID to authenticate against any university online resource. There’s an example of how this might happen in the JISC Review of OpenID, which describes one of the project aims as the development of

bridging software that will allow OpenIDs from any source to be used as identities within the production UK (SAML) federation.

The University of Kent host a demonstrator of this OpenID-to-Shibboleth bridge.

The other aspect of my blueprint is institutional support of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). I am suggesting that the WordPress Multi User platform is one technology that could support the characteristics of a PLE, being: ((Taken from, Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems. Scott Wilson, Prof. Oleg Liber, Mark Johnson, Phil Beauvoir, Paul Sharples & Colin Milligan, University of Bolton. 2006))

  • Focus on coordinating connections between the user and services
  • Symmetric relationships
  • Individualized context
  • Open Internet standards and lightweight proprietary APIs
  • Open content and remix culture
  • Personal and global scope

The PLE implementation which I have in mind is not, like the VLE, a monolithic system but rather a platform which aggregates and co-ordinates external user-centric services into a coherent learning environment. It is a parasitic system, feeding off content from existing online services such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis and social networks, but also a rewarding environment which supports and develops the student’s existing portfolio ((In many ways, I am thinking of ‘Identity’ and ‘Portfolio’ as being largely synonymous during the student’s period of study.)) throughout their period of study.

I’ve shown how WordPress can aggregate and archive course activity, how it can enhance the discovery and connectivity of an individual’s and institution’s online profile through the addition of semantic-web-enabling plugins, how it can syndicate filtered content to other internal and external systems (through the use of feed2js, it can also syndicate content to legacy systems like Blackboard, which don’t support embedded web feeds). I’ve also shown that it can support a lightweight social network that integrates with an institution’s LDAP/Active Directory authentication system, and that social network can be OpenID enabled, allowing users to optionally link their OpenID to their WordPress/LDAP account and login via OpenID instead. ((I’ve tested this with DiSo’s OpenID plugin, which works in principle, but I suspect that once set up, the OpenID login for the specified account, completely bypasses the LDAP authentication. Surely just a small amount of development would provide tighter integration. Incidentally, a Shibboleth plugin (by the same author of the OpenID plugin) for WordPress also exists.))

Finally, the institutional and wider benefits to the public can be found when the cumulative data of the platform is itself aggregated into a structured site that enables discovery and re-use of content. An example of this is our Community Posts site, and I have also previously discussed the potential development and exploitation of this resource. Designed and licensed carefully, such a site could provide open educational resources at both user and programmatic levels.

So what empowers the user/student and puts them in control? Data-Portability and Creative Commons licensing? ((Actually, I’m starting to think that CC licensing is little more than an interim step to a better understanding of ‘data’. See ‘You don’t nor need to own your data‘ When knowledge is transmitted online, every aspect of its representation is in a form of data. Both information and instruction become ‘data’ – isn’t it backwards to think of knowledge in terms of something ‘owned’ Do you think of instructional methods as ‘yours’?)).

Open Education Project Blueprint

Each participant on the Mozilla Open Education Course, has been asked to develop a project blueprint. Here is the start of mine. It’s basically a ‘Personal Learning Environment’ (PLE) ((See Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems))and I’m going to try to show how WordPress MU is a good technology platform for an institution to easily and effectively support a PLE. I’m going to place an emphasis on ‘identity’ because it’s something I want to learn more about.

Short description

University students are at least 18 years old and have spent many years unconsciously accumulating or deliberately developing a digital identity. When people enter university they are expected to accept a new digital identity, one which may rarely acknowledge and easily exploit their preceding experience and productivity. Students are given a new email address, a university ID, expected to submit course work using new, institutionally unique tools and develop a portfolio of work over three to four years which is set apart from their existing portfolio of work and often difficult to fully exploit after graduation.

I think this will be increasingly questioned and resisted by individuals paying to study at university. Both students and staff will suffer this disconnect caused by institutions not employing available online technologies and standards rapidly enough. There is a legacy of universities expecting and being expected to provide online tools to staff and students. This was useful and necessary several years ago, but it’s now quite possible for individuals in the UK to study, learn and work apart from any institutional technology provision. For example, Google provides many of these tools and will have a longer relationship with the individual than the university is likely to.

Many students and staff are relinquishing institutional technology ties and an indicator of this is the massive % of students who do not use their university email address (96% in one case study). In the UK, universities are keen to accept mature, work-based and part-time students. For these students, university is just a single part of their lives and should not require the development of a digital identity that mainly serves the institution, rather than the individual.

How would it work?

Students identify themselves with their OpenID, which authenticates against a Shibboleth Service Provider. ((See the JISC Review of OpenID.)) They create, publish and syndicate their course work, privately or publicly using the web services of their choice. Students don’t turn in work for assessment, but rather publish their work for assessment under a CC license of their choice.

It’s basically a PLE project blueprint with an emphasis on identity and data-portability. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get a fully working model to demonstrate by the end of the course, but I will try to show how existing technologies could be stitched together to achieve what I’m aiming for. Of course, the technologies are not really the issue here, the challenge is showing how this might work in an institutional context.

I think it will be possible to show how it’s technically possible using a single platform such as WordPress which has Facebook Connnect, OAuth, OpenID, Shibboleth and RPX plugins. WordPress is also microformat friendly and profile information can be easily exported in the hCard format. hResume would be ideal for developing an academic profile. The Diso project are leading the way in this area.

Similar projects:

UMW Blogs?

Open Technology:

OpenID, OAuth, RPX, Shibboleth, RSS, Atom, Microformats, XMPP, OPML, AtomPub, XML-RPC + WordPress

Open Content / Licensing:

I’ll look at how Creative Commons licensing may be compatible with our staff and student IP policies.

Open Pedagogy

No idea. This is a new area for me. I’m hoping that the Mozilla/CC Open Education course can point me in the right direction for this. Maybe you have some suggestions, too?