ePortfolios and Digital Identity
While we are still in the infancy of ePortfolio history, its emergence has already had a major impact on current learning technologies development, as well as on our reflection on information systems and architectures. Beyond learning, employability and social inclusion, the ePortfolio elicits the critical issue of privacy and control: who owns and can exploit our personal data, the digital representation of ourselves. Perhaps the issue of ePortfolio can be subsumed to that of digital identity, i.e. the extension of our physical identity, an ePortfolio being the mere projection of one's identity?
A few years ago (2004), when exploring the requirements of an ePortfolio that was more than a mere 'paperless portfolio' we defined the 'ePortfolio TOUCH':
- Transparency of usage: show me yours, I’ll show you mine!
- Opacity of contents: don’t touch my digital clone!
- Ubiquitous: ePortfolios of the world, unite!
- Celebration of achievements: my ePortfolio is at the beauty parlour!
- Holistic: reunite my digital self!
The ePortfolio TOUCH meant to express that today most of the digital information about ourselves is in the hands of a myriad of third parties who are in control of our most personal data. Our digital representation is being enslaved and the ePortfolio was meant as a tool to free our digital self, to regain control over our digital identity. In order to make it more stricking we claimed the right to digital suicide, i.e. the right to disappear from the cybersphere — this means that we also have the right/duty to fight digital suicide bombers, like some integrist activist hackers! A less radical statement is the right to foregiveness, i.e. the ability to erase from the cybersphere information about ourselves we didn't want published anymore, like blog entries written under the influence of hormones rush or less legal substances. And the corelation of foregiveness is the right to know, even if modesty forbids: "I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited" — Oscar Wilde.
The issue was not so much privacy and protection than the active exploitation of one's digital identity. Protection of private data, unless connected to the exploitation of those private data, is meaningless: data are collected with a pupose, and if there is no purpose, then it might be better not to collect any data in the first place. So, more than the right to digital suicide or foregiveness, what we really wished to promote was a healthy and joyfull exploitation of our digital clones.
Understanding the central place of the issues linked to digital identity meant that it was critical for the ePortfolio community to connect with those communities already working in the field of digital identity like Liberty Alliance and Identity Commons. Understanding that constructing a portfolio is constructing one's digital identity, and that this construction is social, made it also clear to some of the members of the ePortfolio community that we needed to engage with the social software community.
