Identity

The EDUCAUSE Live! Spotlight on Identity Management series is a six-month series that will feature one or two speakers from a campus that have analyzed or solved a problem in a way that many people will find instructive.

The meaning of "student" is evolving at Duke University in response to many institutional and faculty outreach efforts. This trend is mirrored at many of Duke's peer institutions. In this free seminar on April 18, The Evolving Definition of “Student”: Identity Management at Duke University, presenters Klara Jelinkova, Director, Computing Systems, and Lynne O’Brien, Director, Academic Technology and Instructional Services, Duke University, will discuss the issues, concepts, and solutions surrounding identity management proposed and implemented at Duke University.

On 15 November 2007, Matt Riddle and I attended the “Poke 1.0” symposium at London Knowledge Lab organised by Neil Selwyn. Some brief thoughts and notes on the day here: overall, it was a really exciting and energising event, and I felt there was a strong sense of a nascent research community starting to coalesce. Here are parallel reviews by Lewis Goodings and Juliet Eve.

This post sort of follows on from my musings on Pownce, and the relative (in)utility of the current glut of social networking "services".

Received any Spock trust invitations lately?

Spock, a self-described “people search application that allows you to see what your friends and colleagues are doing on the web”, could potentially tell us something about the future of metasearch engines—those clunky crawlers that tried, and mostly failed, to bridge the gap between structured web directories like Dmoz, and the chaotic openness of Google’s PageRank™ technology. Although its interface design, a web-2.0-ified “Google Classic Home”, is so trendy that I’m afraid it’s already terribly dated.

The opening keynote speech at the 2007 Educause Policy Conference was delivered by Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Through public policy debate, forums, and publications, the Cato Institute strives to broaden public access to government policy with particular emphasis on the role of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets. This speech, entitled "Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood", uses the REAL ID Act as a springboard for discussion about the need for competitive, responsive identification that protects individual privacy and civil liberties. This podcast has a runtime of approximately 40 minutes.

The e-portfolio community would agree that reflection is a key part of learning, and by association, a key activity for owners of e-portfolios. The IMS e-portfolio specification includes a special <reflexion> element, designed to highlight this and separate it from other e-portfolio elements. But the distinction between reflexion and other e-portfolio elements in the IMS spec (notably, <assertion>) remains unclear, and this has the potential to affect the way that we understand and interpret identity, ownership, and activity in relation to e-portfolios. Pondering this, Scott Wilson asks:


Good question. The relevant bit of the IMS ePortfolio Best Practice Guide seems to be 3.1.7: Using Core Data Structures: Assertion / Reflexion. To the authors' credit, they've had a stab at defining reflection, but I find their definition insufficient because it raises questions similar to Scott's. The wording in 3.1.7 seems to me to mirror some slightly fuzzy thinking about the nature and role of reflection in e-portfolios. And the actual example of reflexion (XML format) given is alarmingly simplistic:

The discussion of persistent identity started by  Catherine Howell's post  has taken another turn for me that she presaged in her reasons not to use blogs in education (see below).


In replying to the thread he started, Andrew Middleton says


Stephen Downes took several issues with Catherine, one of which agreed  with Middleton