Tagging with URI

Cross-referencing is one of the key activities when building a portfolio used for accreditation of prior learning or to gain a competency-based qualification. How does it work:

  • On the one hand, candidates have a list of competencies and performance criteria
  • On the other hand, candidates collect a number of evidence demonstrating their competencies
Then
  •  for every piece of evidence the candidate indicates which competencies / units / elements / performance criteria it covers
  • for each unit / element / performance criteria the candidate indicates which pieces of evidence support the claim
With a computer, there is a very simple way of doing this: using competency definitions as tags. Once all the pieces of evidences are tagged with the various competency definitions it is easy to retrieve all those linked to a particular competency and the all the competencies linked to a single piece of evidence. The simple process of tagging creates all the cross references needed to have the portfolio reviewed by an assessor who can then (in)validate the links.
There are two ways of creating this kind of tag with existing systems:
  1. strings: the title of the competency/performance criteria —pros: relatively user friendly (probably not if the user has to key in long definitions); cons: ambiguity as the same string of characters can refer to different definitions; and risks of typos (that can be reduced by providing drop-down boxes)
  2. URL/URI: the address of the competency definition —pro: uniqueness; cons: not user friendly
There is a third way, that would require very little effort from ePortfolio publishers: using URL/URIs as tags while making it user-friendly: users would select a definition from a competency repository, drag it in the ‘tag’ section of the piece of evidence. The tag would appear as a string to the user, but the URI would point to the competency definition. The level of granularity of a URI could be down to a single performance criterion.
Ta make it backward compatible and allow users to create tags without URIs, the URI field could be set to null. This could also encourage groups of people and communities to create and share their own meaningful URIs/definitions.
Of course, this method of URI tagging is not restricted to ePortfolios and could be generalised to any kind of tagging, like linking a blog entry to Learning Forum London or ePortfolio 2009 could use the same URI http://www.epforum.eu —today it is ep2009, hoping that nobody else with use it or won’t use ePortfolio2009 or ePortfolio 09…
And of course, to make this work seamlessly, instead of having each ePortfolio system create its own internal representation of competency frameworks, these frameworks could be made public through a series of distributed repositories providing the desired URIs that could be shared within a community of professionals an organisation or a sector.
The solution to unique resource identifiers for competency definition has already been discussed by Simon Grant (Representing frameworks of skill and competence for interoperability and more recently in Representing defining and using ability competency and similar concepts). It is clear that we have all the technology required and the solutions are not exactly rocket science. What is missing is the political impetus and committment.
One could imagine that each URI is translated into a URL where the competency map could be represented by a hierarchy of directories:
  • language / sector / domain / area / unit / element / performance criteria
  • language / sector / domain / area / unit ? data = “knowledge”, “evidence examples”, etc.
This is one possible representation, and there are alternative equivalents.
One of the goals of EIfEL for the Learning Forum London conference is to create a consensus within the ePortfolio community, and possibly beyond, on:
  • “URI tagging” as a general mechanism for tagging
  • Establish a number of initial competency repositories providing URIs using existing occupational competency standards and a simple mechanism for growing internally and externally those repositories
  • Draw a roadmap for future developments

“The Internet of Subjects” Manifesto

EIfEL is currently working on the publication of “The Internet of Subjects” Manifesto. The objective is to bring together all the current efforts to make the Internet more ‘subject centric’, taking into account the human factor.

“The Internet of Subjects” Manifesto


The central role individuals now play in the Internet, calls for a radical rethinking of its organisation, in particular, the way the ever-increasing flow of personal data is being created, stored, connected, accessed, protected, tracked, exploited and managed. There is a need to create the foundations of an Internet where the architecture creates the conditions for the free association of self-conscious individuals, beyond the pre-defined boundaries of current information systems and social networks.

The foresight of an Internet of Subjects, rests on a vision of self-conscious subjects who are in full control of the whole of their personal data, from personal healthcare, education and employment records, to bank, sales and various tracking records generated in the cyberspace.

The Internet of Subjects aims at being a people enabler, creating the conditions developing one’s social and professional identity and contribute to the growth of social capital.

The Internet of Subjects aims also at being a business enabler, creating the conditions for for-profit as well as not-for-profit organisations, public and private agencies, to provide personalised services while using personal data ethically, as defined by the individuals.

To achieve this, a second order change is required. Thanks to research, innovation, improved quality of online services and the ever-decreasing costs of online storage, bandwidth and computing power, we have reached the tipping point where this second order change is now made possible

[…]

If you want to join the conversation and contribute to the Manifesto, please contact serge.ravet@eife-l.org.

The Identity Centric Framework

The tremendous work done by organisations such as the Oasis Group, Liberty Alliance and Open ID on specifications and standards for digital identity call for a profound transformation of the Internet, moving from the “Internet of documents” to the “Internet of Subjects.” In an Internet of Subjects, we don’t want our actions to be limited by existing social network services provided by a third party, we want to be able to create social networks on the fly, just like in real life —and undo them without losing any data. We also want to be able to keep in one place (possibly distributed), a place we own, all the publications, contributions and various artefacts and tracks generated during our Internet activities.

Publication mechanisms like trackback demonstrate that it is possible to publish a blog entry or a comment in a personal space to make it visible in another one, so if a specific aggregation of blog entries/comments is not supported anymore (let’s say that this instance of Blogger disappears), then the entries and comments will still be available in my personal space (today I use a Word copy as save). Of course, the use of trackback has been impeded by pirates trying to circumvent anti-spam software, but this general mechanism (or equivalent) could be revived and systematised in a trustworthy environment, using social computing to support reputation mechanism.

In order to give a genral framework for these reflections, I’ve come up with something named the “Identity Centric Framework” (ICF) with the intention to to codify a set of fundamental principles to which any identity architecture should conform to be universal and sustainable. This framework can be seen as a derivation of the Microsoft’s identity metasystemand laws of identity. The principles can be summarised by the acronym “ID TOUCH.”

A universal identity centric system should be:

  • Independent: it should be sovereign and independent from commercial or partisan interests; it should be based on the existence of multiple, competitive, operators and technologies.
  • Dependable: it should have a provision to guarantee that personal data are free from potential loss or theft as well as identity attacks.
  • Transparent: it should provide accurate reports and statistics on how one’s personal data is being used by third parties. It should also provide negotiation and discovery mechanisms for social interaction and data exchange.
  • Opaque: it should provide mechanisms to fine-tune external visibility of personal data, up to the point of total opacity and anonymity —except for legal or regulatory requirements. It should include encryption and other techniques to limit the risks of undesired disclosure.
  • Unifying: it should provide a seamless experience across contexts (e.g. healthcare, education, employment, leisure, mobility) and identities while keeping a clear separation between independent contexts and multiple identities.
  • Communal: Identity systems must recognise and exploit the social nature of identity. Mechanisms such as reputation and trust should be native features of identity systems.
  • Humanist: the underpinning values of an identity centric system is a humanist vision of technology refusing the reification of human beings and promoting an open and free society.

What have we learned from ePortfolio and Personal Health Records?

We have learned from ePortfolios and personal health records that:

  1. Being digital transforms the nature of documents and associated practices.
  2. By making people the managers of their personal data, the fragmentation of personal information is dramatically reduced, leading to an improved quality of communication across people, departments and institutions, as well as a better performance of the system as a whole.
  3. Giving people a sense of ownership of their personal data improves their understanding, self-esteem and ability to achieve their goals, as learner or patient.
  4. The separation of personal data records based on institutional boundaries (e.g. learning records and health records) are not relevant to the individual and is eventually counter-productive for the institutions.
  5. The nature of learners and patients is social, so is the contents of their personal records: patients records are evidence of performance of medical staff as individual ePortfolios evidence of performance of education staff, e.g. for quality assurance purpose. And profile data can be used to create communities of interests, lobbies and communities of practice.
  6. Experience shows that we cannot trust private or public organisations to host securely personal data. Despite all security measures, if one organisation is allowed to have massive amount of personal data, there always the risk that someone will loose a DVD in a train or sell the data on eBay.

The use digital technologies with portfolios or health records, has lead to a much greater transformation than the mere dematerialisation of documents. ePortfolios are not just paperless portfolios, nor are digital personal health records, paperless health records. Both are transforming the practice of their owners as well as that of the professionals working with them. When empowered with the management of their personal data, learners like patients tend to take more responsibility with their own learning or healing. Relationships with and among teachers / doctors are also transformed, as well as that with fellow learners / patients.

Moreover, personal health records can be viewed as some kind of learning records as patients need to learn new facts, procedures and reflect on their behaviour —and before being a patient, proactively maintain one’s own health and contribute to that of others. And for athletes, healthcare data are also evidence of their learning and material for reflecting.

From the point of view of the individual, there is no clear separation between a learning record and a healthcare record. They both are an aggregation of attributes, some of the attributes are common to both aggregations: for example, work patterns are of interest to doctors and dietary requirements useful to other than doctors —e.g. conference organisers…

In terms of privacy, publicity and security, both share the same constraints. There is a need to manage the level of privacy from totally private data, to data restricted to certain groups of people and professionals, up to publicly available records —e.g. qualifications / blood type. But we cannot allow that organisations, private or public, host massive amount of personal data on a server without being under a strict control of individuals and making the massive export of data impossible to achieve or exploit —e.g. by making each individual record jammed with individual real-time encryption keys provided with the informed consent of individuals (with a ‘break the glass’ policy, if the principal is unconscious, something addressed by TAS3).

Just like patients have to deal with different professionals at different points in time, learners and workers have to deal with a number of different institutions. One can be working as an IT professional in a company, be a member of an IT professional body like the British Computer Society, teach at a university and provide support to local businesses, all this contributing to his/her identity as ‘IT professional’. The way systems are set today, this IT professional will have a number of accounts, at best federated, dealing with the idiosyncrasies of various information systems to keep-up with his/her personal data. His/her identity will be fragmented.

While current implementations of federation of identities and services allow one person to unify a number of fragmented accounts, an Internet architecture “subject centred” should allow one person to have a unified account (a kind of ‘digital safe’) that would be used in a number of different transactions. For example, I would have one ePortfolio repository and each of the different institutions I am interacting with would pull/push data from/to this repository (probably distributed, for security reason) encrypted by one or more public key.

A subject centred Internet should allow us to regain control on how our personal data are being stored, accessed and managed.

From digital identity to socially connected free subjects

While the tools and architectures developed to support digital identity as a means of managing access to data (authorisation, authentication) and ensure that the policies attached to those data are being enforced (privacy, preventing identity theft), the general architecture of the Internet has not fundamentally changed. Federated identities (single sign on) and federated services (sharing identity attributes across domains) mark undoubtedly a progress for end-users as well as service providers. On the Internet, a space where there is no real face to face, it is now possible to establish a level of trust similar to that of the real world —including the possibility of being deceived or stolen… The translation in the cyberspace of real-life documents (identity cards) and practices (authorisation and authentication) could be described as the result of an assimilation process, a first order change.

Although, to a certain extent, we have been able to replicate in the cyberspace the documents and behaviours required for managing access to personal data —and a number of initiatives, like TAS3, are working on technologies that will increase the level of trust in transactions involving personal data— we are still far away from an Internet that could be qualified as Internet of subjects. Digital identity technology is only part of the solution that will fully empower individuals as active subjects of the Internet.

If we want to fully exploit the benefits of an ‘Internet of subjects’ based on the free association of self-conscious and self-controlled connected identities, a second order change is required. While this second order change will most likely build on the technical foundations led by consortia such as the Oasis Group, Liberty Alliance, OpenID and Open Social, the full power of these foundations need to be expressed within a new conceptual framework, a conceptual framework for digital subjects.

The emergence of socially connected digital identities

While we might be decades away from the ‘Internet of objects’ promised by IPV6, the ‘Internet of People’ is already there and strong, demonstrating the power of technology to transform the way we think, learn, work, collaborate, do business, entertain and plan our future. People are now acting subjects of the Internet, transforming the Internet for people and organisations to the Internet of people. We are moving away from an Internet where individuals were treated as mere objects to an Internet where they are acting social subjects. The reification process of the human being by technology was not our fate.

The central role individuals now play in the Internet, calls for a radical rethinking of its organisation, in particular, the way the ever-increasing flow of personal data is being created, stored, connected, accessed, protected, exploited and managed.

The growing use of the Internet leading to the accumulation of personal digital records, their sheer number, scope and diversity leads to the emergence of what is now commonly referred to as ‘digital identity’ or ‘eSelf.’ Generated as the result of individual’s behaviour, the digital identity is becoming a key component for self-awareness and social interaction for the reflective learner, professional and citizen who are contributing to inventing the 21st century civilisation.

The socially connected digital identity will be the pivot of tomorrows Internet architecture. The Internet of free subjects, where we are in full control or our identity, is the promise of a technological revolution of great magnitude.

About ePortfolio definitions

It is true that there are many different ePortfolio definitions and that their range can be disturbing, not only to the newcomer. It is also true that many ePortfolio practitioners feel the urge to create their own version, and I’m not an exception to that. In fact I like to use different definitions, depending on the context and my goal. For example, I like the definition of the ePortfolio as a personal and community knowledge management tool… as well as digital identity construction tool…

So, why so many definitions? What does this diversity say about the ePortfolio and the practitioners who are using/describing it? Is it a problem and should we all agree on one and only definition?

Why so many definitions?

While the ePortfolio is an emerging technology, many of the practices and concepts used to describe it were born in the era of the paper-based portfolio. It is natural that new practices and concepts emerge from a new technology, and that conversely technology is being transformed by emerging practices! One of the most radical changes is probably the use of social computing, making the ePortfolio, not only a ‘paperless portfolio’ but a social object. Another change is the emergence of user generated contents and contexts, the learner being the producer of learning resources and environment used by other learners. With such practices, the ePortfolio is not the mere repository of good students work and reflection, but the repository of knowledge used by others. The ePortfolio is not just a demonstration of one’s learning but the resource used by others to learn, the use by others being the evidence of learning. The ‘learning to learn’ mantra should probably be replaced by ‘learning to share’ or ‘learning to teach’.
What do a paperless portfolio and socially connected portfolio have in common, beyond being both digital and containing some reflections? Probably very little. So, why should definitions be identical?

Should we all agree on one and only definition?

Epistemology tells us that when concepts become fuzzy or contradictory, when the reality can’t be properly described by a concept anymore, then this concept should be abandoned and replaced by a better one. Trying to twist the definition of a portfolio to that of an ePortfolio has probably become counter-productive at this stage.
Using the same name to refer to many different realities is certainly not helpful, and it would be nice to agree on one definition. And this definition should be precise enough to avoid the kind of comments I’ve heard so many times: “so, everything is an ePortfolio.” And the solution might be to say that an ePortfolio is a “portfolio constructed with the help of digital technology”, keeping the current definition of a portfolio. This would suppress the contradictory definitions that were mentioned before. But then, to what concept should we attach those definitions?

I suggest that the range of contradictory/complementary definitions, from paperless portfolios to personal knowledge management tools, should be sublated into another concept. For the lack of better term, I suggest “digital identity” or “eSelf”, i.e. the use of technology as the support of one’s identity construction.

Learning is not about creating portfolios, it is about constructing one’s social identity. The ePortfolio should be a mean, not an end. And just like paper-based portfolios could be an obstacle to the recognition of learning (building a portfolio involve a set of skills that are different from those of “Speaking French”, so obliging a person to construct a portfolio to have their linguistic competencies recognised could be counter-productive), ePortfolios can become an obstacle to learning — ePortfolio of learning are still more common that portfolio for learning…

Why should the ePortfolio be subsumed by eSelf?

The ePortfolio has not escaped from a representation of reality where people are compartmentalised in silos. The fact that to properly describe an ePortfolio, you need to add a modifier such as ‘marketing’, ‘learning’, ‘assessment’ or ‘employment’ means that the concept of ePortfolio on its own is simply a compilation of files with a dash of reflection adapted to a number of pre-defined purposes.

If the objective of the ePortfolio is the demonstration of reflective learning and practice, then does one absolutely need an ePortfolio to perform or even demonstrate reflective learning and practice? Is our objective to perform or demonstrate? Do we need to demonstrate in order to perform effectively, and is the ePortfolio the best way to perform reflective learning and practice? Are their other ways? Shouldn’t we look at naturally occurring opportunities for demonstrating evidence of reflective learning and practice, without the need to spend time in the compilation of a document, that might be useful from the point of view of an institution that delivers a qualification or hire for a job, but not for everyday’s practice? Can discrete compilation of documents be sufficient, or do we need something continuous, more organically linked to our everyday’s life?

The eSelf is a means to break the barriers across silos and information systems, the compartments and roles in which institutions tend to lock us in. I want to exist on the web without the filter of some pre-defined template or procedure, where I communicate with others through my left and right brains — most of ePortfolio are left-brain based, even in the field of media studies…

Should we continue to use the concept of ePortfolio?

It is certain that if we tell those who are starting to support the idea that everyone should have an ePortfolio, that what they should really be supporting is that everyone should have a digital identity, then we might lose some of them. This is not to say that the ePortfolio is a necessary step towards the eSelf but that we need to be advanced, yet acceptable if we want to have our message being heard. This is why I don’t mind about the variety of ePortfolio definitions, so I can continue to use the word while meaning my “digital identity.”

Learning 2.0 : User Generated Contents or User Generated Contexts ?

During a workshop organised to review a study on Learning 2.0 at IPTS in Seville, in order to express my vision of what Learning 2.0 might be about, I proposed to reflect on the concept of User Generated Context.

There are currently many discussions and initiatives relative to User Generated Contents, and this is often presented as one of the great achievements of Web 2.0. My position is that, while this is a good thing, this is not revolutionary: when I was a student, many of the polycopiés (printed course notes) were produced by students, often reviewed and validated by professors. And the Web 1.0 was very good at supporting and generalising this kind of practice. What has now changed, with technologies like wikis, is that it is easier to create course material collaboratively, keep it updated, connect it to many other kinds of resources and documents. For example, it is easy to cross-reference the portfolios of students who have worked on the contents of a particular course with the contents of the course itself, making the course material a kind of ‘learning magnet’ (rather than a ‘learning object’, but his is for another conversation), an attractor, an aggregator of ongoing intellectual production. The learning material becomes the result of a percolation process where the best of individual and collaborative production is being identified, recognised and celebrated.

I see what is happening with User Generated Contents, the ability to create, co-create, cross-reference knowledge as a first order learning. And moving from a system where learners as seen as mere consumers of contents, to a world where they are valued and celebrated as knowledge producers is certainly a worthwhile mental step. What I’m really interested in to explore is a second order of learning, where learners are not only the creators of contents but contexts, where learning outcomes are not simply contents but contexts, where the learning situation is flexible enough to be transformed in the very process of learning, where reflexive learning transforms learning—learning about learning.
EIfEL defines learning as the combination of individual, community, organisational, territorial and societal learning, which means that it is a transformative process which happens simultaneously within all these dimensions, each with their own rhythms of transformation. The context in which learning happens is not an invariant — group, institution, community etc. — but the outcome of previous learning and the starting point for further learning. But while we have some understanding of what a learning individual or organisation is, they are generally discussed in different communities, and rare are the teachers or parents that (want to) see the school as a learning organisation.

Moreover, the learning situation itself is a learning situation. While this sounds like a tautology, what I want to express is the idea that learning about learning, reflective learning transforms learning. The learning context is changed by the learning itself. This is not as elegant and striking as James Glieck writing “Life learned itself into existence”, who conveys the idea that learning and life are the two sides of the same object, but this is the same kind of idea that I would like to elicit by what will sound like a double tautology: “learning learned itself into learning”.

By moving the reflection from contents to contexts, we might have an opportunity to better connect individual and organisational learning, creating the conditions for institutional transformation, inviting pupils and parents to invent the school of tomorrow.

This also has an implication on the way we use technology, how learning environments are being constructed. The experience of pupils and students moving from the technology they use in ‘real life’ to the one used by institutions is often extremely frustrating as institutions are generally incapable of (or don’t want) providing state of the art technology — many school and university digital learning environments are wonderful time travel machine… to the past (in terms of technologies as well as pedagogies).

Why not use pupils and students to create the contexts in which they learn, using state of the art technology, inventing tomorrows technologies and practices. What we have today with digital technology such as social computing, virtual worlds, ePortfolios (individual and organisational) is the ability to create our own contexts and transform the contexts in which we operate. The context itself can become the artefact produced as outcome of a learning process. It should.

Of course, the very idea of User Generated Contexts renders obsolete the programme assigned to Learning Design (in the sense of IMS-LD and other Educational Modelling Languages – EML), unless EML had the ability to transform itself through some kind of auto-coding, while learning takes place. IMS-Learning Design being incapable of supporting such vision, it might be time to send it once for all to the dustbin of technology history.

PLE, PRM and ePortfolios

During the VRM (vendor relationship management) session at ePortfolio 2008 chaired by Graham Sadd (PAOGA) 2 presentations by Peter Murton (PAOGA) and Bart Stevens (iChoosr) reminded me the discussion relative to individual and organisational portfolio: is the organisational/community portfolio an aggregation of individual eportfolios or the individual ePortfolios a by-product of the construction of an organisational/community portfolio.

Peter Murton presented MySortingOffice, a VRM application with interesting features such as multiple persona, temporary email and telephone numbers, anonymisation, etc. so multiple identities can be used to manage relationships with vendors.
Bart Stevens presented the example of the use of RFP (request for proposals) by communities to order heating oil and get discounts over 20% in comparison of the prices individual buyers would get.
So, in one case we have a Personal Relationship Management System (PRM) and the other, a Community Relationship Management sytem.