Collaboration/Innovation strand:
A key aspect that came out of the recent JISC/CETIS conference at Herriot Watt (for me) was the fascinating debate around the approaches to the issues of control, ownership and authority in relation to identity … issues that were constantly highlighted throughout the day by two fundamentally different philosophies:
Organic bottom up production of content/identity controlled by the individual and distributed across a number of domains: within blogs, ePortfolios such e.g. ELGG and so on. The control residing at individual level allows for context and meaning of that identity to be constantly negotiated and then renegotiated - even simply by closing and opening multiple accounts, storing ones personal data in different spaces and maintaining control over which of those are exposed to the world. Hence identity is fluid and only ever partial - perhaps one might even add extensible i.e. I can create new aspects to my identity that I think are useful or I want to expose to others … creativity? This is an identity for social communication as we are in control and allows for changes that are stimulated by interactions such as dialogue and networking.
The other side is a model of identity controlled and categorised by framework of standards and set of categories that work in a top down fashion … and in these environments ones identity is shaped, negotiated, managed and effectively owned by the system. This can create a rigid controlled formula of applied criteria and produce a nominally fixed identity. This is an identity for doing things, an identity for action, for example accessing bank records, learning materials and so on. It is not one that is naturally conducive to social communication (and change) - it is not dynamic. The loss of ownership - the fixed identity - is further exemplified when systems start talking to each other using these identity templates - we do not know which part of our identity is being deployed to negotiate a relationship between say our educational records and our bank records?
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