I blog, therefore I am
Or perhaps that should be 'I think, therefore I (can) blog'. Not perhaps an accurate use of Descartes' method, but it would be interesting to see what great philosophers of earlier times would have made of 'digital identities' or the 'digital self'. Stephen Downes posts a really interesting article 'My digital identity' and relates aspects of identity to e-portfolios. I am keenly interested in e-portfolio services that support life-long learners so institutional e-portfolios, while often serving institutions really well, fall short of my personal ideals from a life-long perspective. Which is why I love to see thoughts such as the following 'borrowed from Downes, who borrows some comments from Helen Barrett, who cites Gary Brown' when he says:
'one aspect of e-portfolio technology is a shift from the idea that a learner takes a course from a particular institution or that a learner has a particular source or a particular authority that is teaching them or representing the state of the world to them. (Grush, 2008) More and more learning is happening online and, according to Brown, 50 percent of students are studying from multiple sources, multiple institutions, often at the same time. So the very idea that any system like a learning management system or an e-portfolio system as something that is created and managed by the institution seems in a way seriously misguided. If people are taking things from multiple institutions, then if we have an application that is a single point of reference for their learning, then that application must be of multi-institutional'.I consider myself to be an avid learner yet have no current affiliations with any educational institution. Learning takes place formally, informally within and across multiple institutions and outside of any institutions and my e-portfolio should support this. We use Web 2.0 services to attempt to address this limitation on e-portfolio systems but is there anything else the education system can do to better support our needs? While I am a great fan of Web 2.0 services many of them are commercial operations and part of my digital self only exists at the whims of commercial operators and often short-lived services/fads. What happens when Flickr gets taken over by Yahoo! who may or may not get taken over by an even bigger company? For a start, part of my digital self may get dumped, lost, issued with new identities etc. I have no control over it. The article by Stephen Downes goes on to look at how we traditionally try to establish or assert our identities using the principles of:
- something I know (eg password)
- something I have (eg card key)
- something I am (eg fingerprint)
technorati tags: e-portfolio, OpenID,sictas
