Identity management in education

· ostephens

Speaker: Hellmuth Broda from Sun

I found this session pretty hard to blog. It ranged quite widely around the challenges of identity management, but I’m not sure it came to very firm conclusions. Without the slides (lots of diagrams), it’s difficult to capture some of the stuff, and Hellmuth also used his actual driving license to demonstrates some aspects of identity management – which I can’t get down here!

The original post rambled a bit too much, so I’ve removed most of it, and tried to just bring out some key things that stuck:

  • Problems with managing identity is not a problem unique to computing – each card we carry in our wallets represents an indentity. However, we perhaps face new (larger?) problem.
  • A typical ‘intensive’ IT user has 21 passwords (presumably actually username/password pairs?), and 49% write their passwords down or store in a file on their PC!

    • Location can be a cipher for identity – you know who someone is, because they can access a specific computer. We limit access to systems by asking ‘where are you requesting this from’ rather than necessarily ‘who are you’ (although sometimes both)

  • Hellmuth suggests that in the future, we start to see firewalls (limiting on location) going away, and identity becomes a ‘distributed firewall’. It’s a nice point, but slightly idealistic. We protect data by both location (firewalls) and identity (login) – not one or the other. Also, managing by location is practical, and sometimes desirable – for some applications IP authentication seems both sufficient and works well – it’s easy.
  • The biggest issues around identity management are privacy and trust. Specifically data is prone ‘purpose creep’ – people often are happy for data to be used in a specific context, and only feel privacy has been compromised when the same data is used in a completely different context.
  • Identity Management is becoming more important in the HE sector because of:

    • More stringent regulations
    • Complex identity requirements (and rapidly changing user roles)
    • Enormous scale
    • Working across groups/organisations
    • Cost of changing passwords/identities
  • Stages of Implementing Identity Management are:

    • Stage 1 – every application for itself
    • Stage 2 – central authentication services – enables web initial sign-on for participating applications
    • Stage 3 – full indentity management

    (I guess we at RHUL are currently somewhere between Stage 1 and Stage 2)

  • You have to ‘think female’ to do identity management properly. The ‘male’ way tends to be One Big Database (seems like this should become an IT acronym – as in “I thought we’d do OBD”, or “Using the OBD model we will…”). Female way is to look at much more distributed approach.

Finally, Hellmuth talked about Federation (the female approach) to identity management, and mentioned two key Federation initiatives:
http://www.projectliberty.org/http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/

(We (RHUL) have started with Shibboleth as part of Shibboleap – http://www.angel.ac.uk/ShibboLEAP/)

Sun is a Shib partner, and will support it via SAML 2.0 (due later this year – probably Q2), and they are currently testing Access Manager with a Beta version of SAML 2.0. However, happy to work with customers on Shib connectors before this date.

Towards a Networked Learning Environment

· ostephens

This is a keynote by Matthew Pittinsky from Blackboard. The first thing he has noted is that with all these computers, we are either emailing about it, or blogging it – which isn’t necessarily a nice thought for the speaker!

Slides

Matthew is challenging us not to use the conference to simply confirm our pre-dispostitions, but rather question our beliefs. He is starting with 4 propositions:

E-learning can be radically traditional
Matthew suggests that the idea of e-learning turning HE market on it’s head, and reducing the number of players in the market was always a red herring. A University is not designed to ‘deliver teaching’, but it is a community, bringing together research, teaching, people etc. So, e-learning should be about bringing these people together in an electronic equivalent to a university – not just faculty to student, but other students (without faculty intervention), teaching assistants, libraries, speakers etc., and then to expand across institutions and organisations – a global learning environment.

Essentially the suggestion seems to be that we are looking at breaking down the limitations of time and place to expand the ‘University’ (as a group of people) to a much wider range of people.

E-learning has boundless potential
Matthew is describing 3 challenges (Access, Quality and Efficiency) and 3 technologies (Network, Multimedia, Database) – he sees

Virtual Learning Environments are the least interesting part of e-learning
This is really interesting comment, from the Chairman of Blackboard! I think this is something we really need to get to grips with. What is it that we are trying to do – why have we focussed on VLEs for our e-leaerning. Perhaps what we are going to see is more individual, and diverse, applications and learning objects – e.g. Merlot

Matthew is suggesting that we need to grow an ecosystem around our e-learning systems, by open standards and architectures (as well as open source).

We are moving into eLearning 2.0
This is using ‘2.0’ in the same context as Web 2.0 (and Library 2.0). Essentially we are talking about interactivity – the users are integrated into the service absolutely. This is done by stuff like blogging, with comments, Online discussions, wikis etc.

So – what is the different between e-learning 1.0 to e-learning 2.0?

E-learning 1.0 was about platform adoption, courses, education segments (GCSEs, A levels, degrees)
E-Learning 2.0 is about extending the platform, social networks, lifelong learning

Matthew is now talking about ‘Blackboard Beyond Initiative’. This, he says, is not about Blackboard – it is something run by the universities, although supported by Bb. It is looking at about establishing 4 web services (initially):

1. Learning Objects Catalogue – make globally available catalogues
2. Social Networking – e.g. Facebook, Academici, Furl – but there is no large scale discipline based scholarly based social network – so ‘scholar.com’ – a social networking environment that can plug into any learning environment
3. ePortfolios for life – a hosted service where you can keep your ePortfolio, but also establishing standards to allow you to carry your ePortfolio with you.
4. Benchmarking and Analysis – more sharing of data. A central service that allows any VLE to report (anonymously) on what is happening – so you can see best practice, and get a picture of a learning

And this is just the beginning. Matthew has mentioned the S word (Shibboleth) – but for e-learning, not more traditional ‘library’ type stuff, as well as a range of other things.

I have to say that out of the above, (2) seems to be the most immediately exciting and ‘doable’ – this could start tomorrow. But it isn’t us that need to be convinced, it’s the academics…