I've been looking back at the work I did with on-line learning communities, with others of course, from back in the 1980s - reflecting how all this nonsense about Web 2.0 is just really the daft dot com lot waking up to what we were all doing for the last 20 years. Interestingly now that more people realise that the interactions between people really matter they are seeing a market there, at the point of social interaction, which raises questions about where public service is in these new markets. more of that in a later piece no doubt, but for now I've come over all sad at the opportunity lost when the Blair government pulled back from their commitment to a digital identity for every school student... hence this piece for my guardian column...
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I started building on-line communities back in the 80s, using Prestel for pictures with hot links and Telecom Gold for mail. It worked, but it all seemed a lot easier when the world wide web finally came along in the 90s. However, the Internet is a long way from perfect and has a few gaping holes in it, which matter for learning. Probably because of where academic life was at the time, with it's emphasis on publication and papers, the simple vision was that we would know each other through our publications (as university folk do). Web pages would be papers and other material; if I wanted to find a colleague I would search for her work. Thus, at the heart of our Internet experience we have the universal resource locator, the URL (nowadays the U has come to mean Uniform).
But of course, the world isn't like that. The 21st century is a world of congeniality, of mutuality, of peer to peer support, of mentors, coaches and friendships. I don't want to find resources as much as I want to find people, and I can't: I don't know where they are, if they are connected, who they are with and so on. Users knew from the start that content wasn't king and as soon as they had the tools they began a kind of micro-publishing to give a better sense of who, and where, they are. Blogs, Facebook profiles, Twitter announcements and so on create a much more immediate sense of identity. But there is no escaping the gaping hole in all this that is actual, verifiable identity. There is no universal person locator because there is no identity. The one big promise from the 1997 Stevenson Report, that guided so much of Labour's incoming ICT policy from 1997, was the commitment to an electronic identity for every school student in the country - the Millennium Mail promise. Looking back it is fascinating to reflect on how many of today's problems with security, safety, assessment, portfolios, mobility and more would have been long since solved if the government hadn't backtracked on this central promise. The work we all did to build a wonderful learning system, supported by a generous Larry Ellison and his Oracle team, wasn't wasted, it went on to become Think.com and to help us, amongst other things, build that huge network of headteachers on-line "Talking Heads". But if the millennium mail promise had been fulfilled then today we would have had a clearly audited identity for everyone now under 30. What a missed opportunity.
Who you would you trust today with your identity? You probably wouldn't trust the government, or even the BBC, or Microsoft or Tesco. Advocates of Identity 2.0 like Dick Hardt see a social construction of identity, but in fact schools are sitting on the solution. By the time you have worked collaboratively on-line alongside your peers for a few years it is very hard indeed to fake your identity as a co-learner. A thought for 2008 is that if globally schools could produce a trusted API for identity then that alone would probably fund education systems for the next decade and solve an awful lot of problems with the Internet.
© Prof Stephen Heppell 2008
