There are a number of Higher Education initiatives, both nationally here in Australia and internationally, that are aimed at building a trust fabric to enable secure collaboration between institutions.
Central to these initiatives is the notion of creating federations of institutions who (while maintaining the identity of its staff and students in its internal systems) have developed a trust relationship, agree on basic security standards and interoperate via agreed middleware standards. The approach is for institutions to federate their internal Identity, Authentication and Authorisation systems so as to interoperate with each other.
The major business drivers here are:
- Single Sign On: users logged into University A can access and auto-logon to an application at University B without having to remember a different set of usernames and passwords.
- Access to protected resources: University A can choose to allow users at University B to access protected resources e.g. an online e-Science database.
- Virtual Organisations: Short-lived, online virtual organisations can be easily created. For example a research project can be formed comprising members from multiple universities. They can come together via a secure collaborative workspace.
The major activities in Australia are the Meta Access Management System (MAMS) project and the Middleware Action Plan and Project (MAPS).
MAMS is building a testbed federation of Higher Education institutions www.federation.org.au. Institutions belonging to this federation are developing (or extending) their IT systems to support seamless access by staff and students across the federation using common middleware based on the Internet2 Shibboleth standard.
There are a number of Higher Education initiatives, both nationally and internationally, that are aimed at interoperability between institutional repositories. These include FRODO, ARROW and CORDRA.
These above initiatives can be summarised as progressing an institutional view of identity and collaboration. Recent Internet activities known collectively as Web 2.0 and Identity 2.0 are focused on the paradigm of the Web as a community-based or user-centric social networking fabric Web 2.0 sites such as delic.io.us, flickr promote a view of web where the user is in charge of his/her identity and multiple sites interoperate to promote community based collaboration and resource sharing. Central to this notion are technologies such as:
- Foksonomies and tag clouds
- User-centric identity services such as SXIP, OpenId and Microsoft InfoCard
- Functionality exposed as XML-based web services
It is likely that students and staff within Higher Education institutions will have both institutional and Web 2.0 identities and resource sharing requirements. The challenge for architects of the next generation of Elearning systems will be to accommodate both worlds.
2 Comments
The notions of Web 2.0 and Identity 2.0 are explored well at http://www.identity20.com and http://www.readwriteweb.com/
I’ll question your last comment. Ultimately, if we are to have institutions which support a lifelong learning, we need a single log in. If we consider the web a huge library, then it’s a question of whether we have a public one or a huge number of private ones.
If it’s a public one (and we limit our ideas to a national domain, because that’s the way things normally get funded) our ideas will revolve around using our public library cards as a proof of identification to (online) national resources; in the first instance as a way to keep the spam out of a citizens learning account. Over time, as TRUST BUILDS between remote communities, the degrees of authentication to ‘deeper’ inter- institutional repositories and resources could be added.
If we measure an institution by the number of its global domains (it’s VO’s) that are accessed by citizens, then its likely we might start to see (the aggregation of) more relevant institutions. We won’t see notice the passing of irrelevant institutions ones because, for the most part, they’re already so private, so comples, and considered so untrustworthy, they’re irrelevant.
For how many more years are we to hear that MAMS (and its peers) is “building a testbed federation between institutions”? It seems quite logical I know. But you have to believe that (educational) institutions never change, and there’s 2400 years of evidence, in the western world, to the contrary.
Post a Comment