Web-based portfolios are establishing themselves as a way to present a student's learning and offer opportunities for reflection and dissemination. The web, meanwhile, is moving from a site based model to one that centers around digital identities: web-based representations of ourselves and our work.

This page is a work in progress that aims to introduce educators to some of the issues and resources relating to web-based identity.

The new web model

The web is evolving from a series of sites containing pages and documents into a multi-purpose platform that also serves as a collection of applications:

When the web was conceived, it consisted of documents and pages linked with hypertext: linked words and phrases that, when clicked, would load another, relevant document. Each page had its own Uniform Resource Locator, which allowed you to return to that specific page at any time. Each page could be a destination in itself, and although the sites (collections of pages) could be linked together through hypertext, each one had no need to know about your activities elsewhere on the web. Why would they? Documents don’t have memory; their role is simply to impart information.

Step forward to today, and the web is not entirely made of pages: applications now represent a large amount of the web. [...] The benefits are tangible: you can access an application’s functionality from any web-compatible device, anywhere in the world. You’re no longer bound to the software you happen to have installed on a particular machine, and you no longer need to worry about whether you’ve remembered to save a particular file onto a particular drive. Because of historic resource limitations, web applications tend to be easier to use, and entirely bypass the need for IT departments, which have unfortunately earned a reputation for being obstacles to productivity in many organizations.

Building the user-centered web

Necessarily, these applications need to save their data somewhere. Currently that means within the application itself, but that creates problems when you need these applications tointer-operate, or to use the data from one application in another. It makes sense, therefore, for digital identities to be established, which serve as digital representations of a user, and as a store of that user's data from applications around the web. Such identities would be entirely under the control of their owners, from the visual look and feel to access over individual items of stored data.

Personas, portfolios and user control

Of course, our identities in the real world are fragmented: your professional and personal lives are often kept separate. In the digital identity realm these are refered to as personas, and may be entirely separately hosted. I would argue, however, that this is an aspect of user control over their identity: if the user wants their personas - or some of their personas - to be linked, then they should be. The technologies are now in place to allow this to happen, but need to be embraced by software vendors and users alike.

Personas may serve a use in education as portfolios for assessment and/or learning. In turn, education may have an opportunity to contribute an important piece of functionality back to the wider web.

User control remains important, for the same reasons it's important in the wider web. Facebook revealed their discovery recently that:

When people can control who can see their content, they share more meaningfully.

This has clear implications for identity use in reflective learning.