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So, you know, I've been thinking about this and you ask, what do I think
about when I think about identity? Well it's, I think, it's a little different than what
people who typically think about identity and identity management think about.
I mean in my space I think more about
how we represent ourselves. How we represent ourselves online.
And physical spaces as well.
How you take all these different places. Online,
primarily and how they all come together to create what I'll simply call
medi-identity or sort of the
sum of all these parts that we sprinkle across the web. So my ability to
create parts of my identity in my blog.
Store my links in Delicious. Communicate with a community really, really
quickly on something like Twitter. All those things come together. All those things
are part of sort of this overall picture of who I am. So when I think about identity, it isn't
about the ability to move in and out of a single
space with some consistency. It's really all about being able
to move in and out of multiple spaces and have those multiple be tied together by something.
So it's so important when you really think about if I'm a
student and I'm representing myself online in multiple environments
and one of my activities is to, I don't know,
create some sort of documentary film and I do that and I post it to my
YouTube account, well there's something about that identity marker that's important.
It has to be able to be sort of pulled together and connected to
other parts of who I am online. And so the
ability to maybe log in with my institutional credentials to
all of the external 2.0 spaces is important. But it's also
really important that we have easy ways to aggregate all those identities together.
And bring them together so that students and faculty and staff alike can present
more of a holistic view of who they are and what they're all about. So identity to me
is a little bit different than just simply being able to move in and out
of spaces. It's the ability to move in and out of spaces with a consistent marker and then be able
to pull all those things back together to create, again, sort of that medi-identity
of who I am and what I'm all about.
So then in a lot of ways that's a little different than access management.
It has a lot to do with identity management, but again in
a slightly different way from pure technical terms.
What it means is my ability to actually participate. Participate across the social web
and have what I do across the social web
be transferrable into our environment. So again
if I'm an instructor and I want my students writing blog posts, I want to make sure
that they're using institutional credentials. So I can
somehow trace that back to whom they really are. Academic integrity is a critical piece
to all of this. And so the ability for us to allow students to move in and out of
social environments that make the most sense. And social environments don't really mean
just things like Facebook and MySpace. I mean Flickr is
an amazing social environment as much as it's an amazing photo sharing environment.
And there's so much that can happen there. I can go and I can look
at an individuals photograph. If I can log in with something that is an institutional
marker and I can leave comments there, I can essentially do photo essays
or peer reviews or critiques. Or any number of things that lots and lots
of our students are asked to do. But the only way that that works is if
they're using some sort of consistent identity
that makes sense to us here within our environment.
So without that, going forward, I say that going forward because
this isn't gonna go the other direction. I mean, students are gonna come, increasingly
come, to our campuses with accounts from all sorts of different places.
Some of them with the same username. Some of them with radically different
usernames. So I think at the end of the day what's really important is that we figure
out ways to help them bind perhaps
their external identities to their institutional identity so that they
can participate more freely. The other side of this, is we can no longer really complete with
all the external services. I mean, things happen so quickly and
yesterday it was my blog. Today it was
Tumbler. And tomorrow it may be Posterus. And all those environments differ slightly.
They offer affordances, but at the end of the day it shouldn't really matter
what service or what space a student or a faculty member
or staff member uses to express themselves. What matters is
the end product and the ability to tie that end product to some sort of identity marker.
And so I just think going forward without
stronger views on how identity needs to
be managed, we're not gonna be able to continue to compete.
And our students will clearly continue to go elsewhere to take advantage of environments
and tools that are simple to use. That make sense. And connect them
to a community. We just don't really do a whole lot of that right now in higher education.
And I think it's time we re-think how we manage identity so that
people can sort of flow freely both within our walls and outside of our walls
and still contribute to some sort of overall collection
of artifacts or evidence of the things that they're doing while they're here. You know so one of the bigger questions
that I get asked is, how do we let students do
here what they do out there? And I've sort of touched
on this, but more and more of them are coming to campus with some sort of identity
or presence online that isn't tied to us at all.
I mean if you look at numbers that just use Facebook, for example, here at Penn State.
Well over ninety percent of our students at University Park
are very, very active on Facebook. A quarter of them spend more than five hours
a week there. And so we know that they want
to do this. And there are lots of good reasons for that. And primarily it's
the connection. The connection to the community and things like that.
But as we continue to move through this 2.0 space, it's
much more important now than ever, I think, to provide seamless access to tools.
Tools that are so easy to use. When we ask students
what they want. I mean they tell us flat out, they want better tools.
They want better environments. Things that match what they can do out there. Sort of the rise
of the real-time web. The ability to say what you want to say and have it appear
in multiple places is critical. The rise of the one-button web where you can
literally highlight some text, click a button, and have it shared to blog or
to your Tumbler blog or to Facebook and available to your community
instantly is the way people will publish. I mean that is the way people will publish
going forward. No longer will they even be thinking about what it means to
login and navigate systems and type and publish.
Even that while blog model is so smart compared
to our current LMS or CMS model, it's nothing compared
to where the more savvy users are today and where many, many more people will be tomorrow.
Dropping bookmarklet buttons into their
browser so they can instantly share things into Facebook. Publish photos
to Flickr. Write in their blog. Add a note to something.
Bookmark a site on Delicious. That's the one-button web.
And that's the publishing model going forward. I don't know
that we can continue to build systems here on our own campuses that provide
that kind of a
functionality really. So I think going forward, I mean, I keep saying this, but
being able to use or assert my
institutional identity into some of these external spaces, much like
I do write now with my Google credentials. I can log into lots and lots
of services with that. And the beautiful thing is it's not that I don't have to remember multiple
usernames and passwords, it means that when I do that, in many cases,
it can also tap into my contacts lists or my friends lists.
The same when I use my Facebook credentials it automatically sends a note into
Facebook that says, hey, Cole just joined this site, why don't
you come and participate over here. It sort of
switches the idea of the social network being a place and sort of attaches the social network
to your identity marker. Which is really important if I want to be able to
try out a new environment. I assert my Facebook credentials in my
entire community. All the people I'm friends with
receive updates that say, you know, Cole's now participating in this. And it drives people
over there and you get sort of this ability to move much more easily
into environments and still have connections and friendships and things like that.
Nothing we do right now in higher education looks like that as far as
I can see. And so I think going forward, unless we can figure out how we
become an e d u identity provider of some sort
that makes sense from a services perspective. In other words,
I use my Penn State credentials, but they're
also sort of they've been tied somehow to my Google credentials or to my
Facebook credentials and walk around with that as some sort of like medi-id card.
that I can then assert as I move into spaces so I can have my friends and my
colleagues come with me. I think we're gonna be in trouble. I just don't see
how we can continue to compete unless we step up and re-think
some of the models that we have. And stop thinking about this as totally as technical
problem because in many ways identity is going to solve
some real interesting cultural phenomenon that we're seeing. It's gonna allow
people to do the same kinds of things that they're doing right now and spending lots of time doing
right now online, but to do it within the context of academic work. Whether that's
research or service or teaching or learning. All of those are very
social activities and yet our identity stuff that we
do in higher education really thinks about the individual. And so a
movement more towards a collaborative and open and social sort of way of thinking about
identity I think is really critical. So I hope that my perspective
as someone who thinks about teaching and learning with technology, makes sense
in this regard. So, thanks a lot.