The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills wants 50 per cent of the population to have access to higher education. But how do we make sure that larger cohorts of students most of them highly adept in their social use of IT have the identity management skills to meet not only their communal needs, but also their education, work and financial needs?
It is crucial to recognise that the traditional library is evolving, and much of that learning experience now depends on the quality and ease of use of online resources. In the past, a single library card provided access. Now a range of easily forgotten and sometimes abused login identities are required.
A potential solution to such identity issues is provided by the UK Access Management Federation, a route to single sign-on for multiple resources in numerous departments that gives universities, colleges and service providers secure access to electronic resources.
The Federation is receiving strong support from service providers that have been quick to see the possibilities in enhanced security and increased use of resources. Institutions also see the benefits for their staff and students, where distance learning becomes a reality rather than a pipedream.
But such progress is still not enough. We live in an age where people surf the web at work and at home, interacting with friends, colleagues, fellow learners and educators through new media platforms.
Social networking tools hold far more information about an individual than is necessary for their principal purpose, and are identity providers by default, rather than design.
It is either time to put control of that data back into the hands of the individual through a personal attribute release policy, or have dedicated and trusted identity providers working on our behalf, in the way that educational institutions work in the Federation.
We should be able to set privileges on who can view our information, with a high degree of assurance that such privileges are granted only to the groups of people that we want.
The Federation is a middleware service, brokering identity on users’ behalf. But that requires a degree of independence and responsibility beyond the remit of most Web 2.0 services.
The link between education, society and commerce often causes experts to talk about the problem of multiple identities. Surely that is a misnomer we have one identity but users interact with web services in different ways.
The web became embedded into people’s work and education because it became embedded into their social and domestic life. The same rule applies for identity management. It will only truly take off once online retailers, social networking sites and other organisations adopt similar practices.
What we really need is one individual identity, with several transportable attribute sets determined by the user, that allows interaction with people and services in many different ways.
UK education is doing its bit - over to you Google, Facebook and others.
Mark Williams is an access management outreach co-ordinator for the Joint Information Systems Committee
