Identity & Portfolio
Stephen Downes made a curious keynote presentation at the e-Portfolios conference in Montreal. It was arguably more about identity than ePortfolio but then again maybe the point is that there’s less and less difference between the two. At any rate there’s some great stuff before it unravels. Ze Frank likes to play ‘that makes me think’ Downes makes a similar disclaimer about his relationship to Heidegger as a background for a talk about ePortfolios and digital identity (the slides and audio are here).
- Institutional control vs Individual Control
- Assessment: “…if we ask for grades, we’ll get grades back; if we ask for capacity, we’ll get capacity back.” If we give grades, we’ll get grades.
- Web 2.0 is the technology of inquiry.
- Identity is now an epistemological rather than an ontological problem.
- How can you prove who you are, or equally prove what you are?
- Identification – self-validation vs Authentication – validation by external authority.
- Credit cards as tokens of identity; an odd combination of physical possession, presence, and numerical uniqueness.
- There is no authentication without identification.
- No system of authentication succeeds? This seems counter intuitive, but is probably true; that needs some thinking.
- “There is no token, other than my own body, that I can’t share.” But if the body itself is a kind of token of the self?
- Everything depends on my not wanting someone else to ‘pretend’ to be me.
- Who can we ‘trust’ to validate our identities, to allow someone/us to withdraw money from our bank account, to say we can drive, or to vote.
- OPENID: a persons identity is a web site.
- I have to admire an ‘expert’ who is willing to let things sort of fall apart without getting upset.
