A book for Sense Publishers ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’ series

Practical design patterns for teaching and learning with technology

The format of the day drew heavily on the participatory pattern workshop (PPW) methodology developed during the Planet (Pattern Language Network) project. The PPW process encompasses three distinct workshops (see http://purl.org/planet/Outcomes/Methodology for an overview). The first focuses on shared storytelling and the abstraction of problem-solution pairs that are recorded using the design pattern template. For our first workshop the idea was straightforward - to identify transferable solutions to problems in the area of digital identity based on the concrete successful practices reported in our case-stories; then to represent these as seed design pattern/s described as a ’solution to a problem in a context’.

With close to 35 people attending there was a lot of pressure on everyone, not least our facilitators Yishay, Jim, Mark and myself, to work hard. We started off with a quick paper and pen warm-up activity called the ‘faces of identity’. We asked everyone to draw three facets of their identity on three pre-drawn heads and then turn to their group and describe (i) what these identities represented and (ii) which they promoted and which they kept hidden in online settings. This was a powerful exercise and created some intense discussion that ran over the allotted 10 minutes for the exercise. Comments on this activity (including the rest of the day) can be found over on Margarita’s blog.

There were 19 case-stories in total and we split participants into seven discreet groups each led by a starting case-story. Stories were shared, discussed, questioned and argued over. With some gentle, and not so gentle, pushing and prodding from our facilitators a series of seed patterns were eventually documented. Identifying patterns can be a tricky process and articulating a common problem is more challenging than describing the solution. To scaffold this process and help the participants to move successfully from case-stories to patterns we employed two active approaches:
1) Three Hats Pattern- to share and interrogate stories in a small group setting
2) Table Top Concept Mapping - to draw out the key issues and tensions within case-stories

The full outputs from the day, including the six patterns that were established, are summarised here on the Planet design patterns repository page: http://purl.org/planet/Groups.DigitalIdentities/outputs.

Pattern 1: Others first
Pattern 2: Digital Identity panic
Pattern 3: Whats my name
Pattern 4: Space for lurking
Pattern 5: Facet me
Pattern 6: Permissioned aggregation of identity information

The power of the patterns approach is one of stripping out the specifics to produce transferable solutions that address common problems. But sometimes it can feel that by losing some aspects of the context and moving to a more generic instantiation of the core issues that we lose something of its’ [the case-story] vitality - perhaps this is particularly noticeable when we analyse our [digital] identities and are guilty  of stripping away certain subject positions - such as class, race and gender. Yet I would still argue that producing a solution that can be applied in multiple places is a powerful and revealing process. This issue came up in a case-story that started with motherhood and the uploading of family pictures to a photo-sharing site. This case eventually formed part of a pattern called ‘Others First‘ about parental responsibility towards the digital identity of dependents - particularly children. In this pattern the subject position of motherhood seemed to come under erasure. My thoughts are that this does not necessarily detract from the value of the pattern - it does not erase motherhood, rather in the use of the pattern in solving particular scenarios motherhood will become [re]surfaced as one of a number of [possible] subject positions. The case-stories also remain linked as part of the underlying evidence that supports the patterns. I think in this case there is more than one pattern, particularly surrounding the complications of motherhood and gender in relation to building professional representations of the self. This is not a new issue, where work and motherhood compete, but one that raises new problems when we make choices about how we portray ourselves online. One of the issues with running the workshop over a single day is dealing with the constraints on time that limit the amount of work that can be done to pull out of these related patterns. Many of the groups realised they were dealing with case-stories that held multiple patterns that could have been addressed through developing complimentary patterns.

The second multidisciplinary workshop on ‘Identity in the Information Society’ (IDIS 09) has recently been announced on the theme of ‘Identity and the Impact of Technology’. And will be held at the London School of Economics on 5 June 2009. This is the first time I have noticed this event on the calendar and according to the website - the workshop aims to provide an opportunity to present leading edge research, exchange ideas, encourage collaboration, and build communities across the various research groups working on contemporary identity topics and in related fields of privacy and security. These are the leading questions for the workshop:

• How far has technology altered prevailing notions of identity?
• What new technologies are emerging and what might be their impacts?
• To what extent is it possible to inscribe legal requirements into technologies of identity, and with what results?

This looks like a good place to present the work on digital identity patterns that was started at the Eduserv digital identity event, focusing on the pattern elicitation methodology and elaborating one or two of the patterns for comment and feedback.

The important dates are:
Submission of papers (4000-6000 words): 9 April 2009
Notification to authors: 1 May 2009
Identity in the Information Society Workshop: 5 June 2009
And there is the possibility of publication in the IDIS journal:
Submission of revised papers to IDIS Journal: 6th July 2009
Publication in IDIS Journal from January 2010

The first digital identity event, run under the Eduserv funded programme for digital identity projects is due to take place at the British Library on Janaury 8th 2009. This event serves two purposes. As a soft launch for the three funded projects ‘Rhizome’, ‘This Is Me’ and ‘Assisting the W3C in Opening Social Networking Data’. And as a workshop that will draw together stories relating to the problems and solutions we experience during our varied engagements with what we term ‘digital identity’. The event is being organized by Eduserv, the Rhizome and Planet projects, with an invited list of participants from both inside and outside the institution.

It was decided to host an event where projects do not simply talk at their audience – but rather an active day that is fundamentally about the participants and their experiences. We have chosen a workshop format that is driven by the Planet methodology for pattern language development, an approach that has resonance with the narrative inquiry methodology being adopted by the Rhizome project. The Planet approach is straightforward, taking participants through a number of predefined steps from shared cases to seed patterns. The morning session focuses on storytelling in small groups, and uncovering common themes within shared narratives. In the afternoon these common themes - composed of a problem, solution and associated forces - are used to build the patterns - what Christopher Alexander (1977) defined as:

“a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice”

The key to the success of the workshop is making sure that relevant stories (or cases) are collected in the Planet Xwiki database in advance of the day. To help guide authors, a template is used to organize each narrative - you can view a blogged case here that uses the STARR template:

http://www.margaperez.com/2008/12/im-also-a-starr-tell-me-whom-you-walk-with-and-ill-tell-you-who-you-are/

Further details of the workshop, including cases and patterns developed from other workshops, are available here on the Planet Xwiki site at http://icanhaz.com/planet-digital-identities.

This first event is by invitation only but we will be holding more follow-up workshops. The next is likely to be in late March/early April. So if you are interested in participating then please do contact us.

References
Alexander, C. with S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King, S. Angel (1977) A Pattern Language. Oxford University Press, New York, 1977
See also: http://www.patternlanguage.com/leveltwo/ca.htm

Why use the word rhizome? This project is about digital identities and addresses the issue of the fractured nature of the self when our online identities become distributed across multiple sites and services. Rhizome is a Deleuzian concept that has energised thinking and creativity in the arts, science and philosophy. It is used in this project as a cipher, or a departure point for representing digital identities as:

• decentralised
• unpredictable
• connected
• branching in many directions
• having multiple entry points
• with no single true view, only partial perspectives
• and constituted as a multiplicity of dimensions where we lose the illusion of the objective all seeing eye/I

Deleuze leads us to cartography and the map, a space which has no privileged entry point and is always open to change.

An overview of the project in 21 slides.

We are building the project image. Looking for ideas, visual representations of a rhizome. These two seduced me. Now let’s wait our logo designer produces something along the lines of: ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.’

• First, A visual frequency representation of certain words in the introduction of A thousands Plateaus, by R. Stuart Geiger

• Then, the fragment of Bussotti quoted in Introduction: Rhizome of A Thousands Plateaus Deleuze & Guattari: 5 Piano Pieces for David Tudor (1959), Sylvano Bussotti

Outlining the methodological approach of the Rhizome project:

1.    Desk research based on a review of the existing and heterogeneous literature surrounding online identities and their deployment in the spheres of education and research aiming to:

• Unify research in online identities from the technical aspects relating to authentication and data security through to aspects related to the discursive and contextual nature of digital personas;
• Address the lack of critical analysis surrounding the complex technological landscape of major identity players, for example transactional identity services, where the goals and information handling methods do not always match ethical, functional or usability standards;
• Understand how these services operate given different technologies, environment and user needs;
• Address legal and ethical issues through consultation with the TELOS research group at King’s College London.

2.    A collection and discursive analysis of narrative case studies of online identity deployment in education and research aimed at teasing out user needs, user behaviours, opportunities, challenges and trends. This will be based on a storytelling methodology (Kubler Labosky 2002, Andrews et al. 2008) as an approach for capturing meaningful personal stories to provide insights into individual experiences and perceptions of online identity. This will be driven by two key research questions:

a.    How people manage their own understanding of digital identity in online environments (personal, corporate and administrative) and how identity operates within different contexts?
b.    What kinds of [digital] literacies are needed to support and manage online identity development?

A validated template will be used to collect individual narratives from an identified set of actors in the educational field. The stories will be analysed to create themes and then opened to the community for discussion and commentary to discover patterns and similarities and followed by a final round of analysis. This activity will be supported by two workshop sessions. As documents of contextualised practice the stories will be used as a baseline for identifying and building a framework for good practice providing evidence for patterns of activity that are both successful and problematic.

3.    A scenario building (van der Heijden, 2003) exercise will be used to as a basis for road mapping possible futures in the sphere of online identity. This will be organised online and supported by a roundtable workshop with identified stakeholders who will include decision makers, experts and creative thinkers. Exploratory scenarios will be developed (Schwartz 1996, Ringland 2002) with the aim of fostering the exchange of ideas, identification of challenges and the barriers to the deployment of an online identity research agenda, as well as development and implementation roadmaps in the UK.

4.    The outputs from the above activities will be synthesised to form the basis for the conceptual framework leading to a position paper that will address practical, social and political issues that stem from the research. The paper will be validated by a consultation process involving semi-structured interviews and open comment through a consensus building process with the key stakeholders and main players across the landscape of digital identity production.

5.    Development work on an Open Source software solution will run in parallel and be informed by the outputs from the story and scenario research. This phase of the project will be focussed on the enhancement of a plug-in for the Open Source Wordpress blogging tool (http://www.wordpress.org) and involve design techniques based on user needs analyses and phased testing of the sotware.

Online identity is a construct that has evolved both technically and culturally over the past 15 years. It is an elusive concept that has unsurprisingly given rise to a wide terminological spectrum: from ‘an identity’ made up of identifiers and bits of personal information allowing (i.e. authorising and certifying) an individual to participate in identity transactions; to ‘the digital self’, a prosthetic [digital] identity that extends our real persona, often purposefully created by the individual using personal aggregators and content services, and automatically reified by tools such as a simple Google ego-search.

Electronic information about the individual is represented not only by what one says about oneself, but also all that is said by others and also ones activity in electronic exchanges with both human and with intelligent agents. In our contemporary networked society we can trace online identities that reflect two key issues of concern:

• Control: if our existing online tracks and traces can exist as reifications of our digital selves via Google ego-searches or found automatically collated and stored by people search engines and aggregators then it is fair to say that the construction of these identities is slipping from the grasp of individuals who would seek to produce them or who are object of them.

• Ineluctability: today it is virtually impossible to remain at the margins of digital life and the production of online identity. The emergence of social technologies, coupled with lowered barriers to connectivity has driven fundamental changes in our relationship with the Internet resulting in the democratisation of content production and distribution. The effect has been to massively increase the visibility of digital identities and shift their construction outside of the control of any one person. The effect of increasing levels of fragmentation and disaggregation is to destabilise and undermine our sense of agency and importantly our ability to act with intent and awareness.

Online identities span the boundaries of personal, corporate and administrative processes. Their deployment uncovers a series of challenges, some general, others specific to the educational and research spheres:

• Identity transactions should be simple and open - today concurrent standards and approaches to identity management co-exist. Thus personal data exchange and portability across different technological infrastructures and systems remains one of the key challenges for all.

• Privacy and the rights of the individual should be respected - here we identify privacy issues that surround: the relationship between individuals and education stakeholders, efficacy of various methods of authentication and their security implications, scalability of trust, reusability of data, and the establishment of convenient ways of accessing and managing ones identity and the secure and private handling of sensitive or private information.

• We need to improve the baseline literacy levels in the use of socio-technical systems - to discern which technologies are the more appropriate to use and how to deploy them in lifelong learning settings. Techno-literate individuals do have access to a range of tools to help control the seemingly uncontrollable. These include personal identity providers, identity verification tools, identity management systems, self-presentation devices, reputation management systems and reputation defenders. However, the level of understanding necessary to appreciate the new ‘digital identity landscape’ and adopt these existing tools in an effective manner lies outside the ability of most students, teachers and the wider community of Internet users.

• And we need to address digital identity literacy – the above difficulties are compounded when we consider the effort required by individuals to acquire the appropriate digital [identity] literacies and so be able to participate productively in lifelong learning related transactions such as self-presentation, presentation of competences, ego-branding, job searches, reflective learning, cooperation in communities of practice, peer-learning, social networking, self assessment, evaluation and accreditation.

• Help improve individual risk assessment skills in relation to real or imagined security threats – particularly the low level of awareness in the use of social technologies where ‘user centric profiles’ become distributed backbones of social networks. As highlighted in the latest position paper of the European Network and Information Security Agency (Hogben, 2007), we are witnessing uncontrolled digital dossier aggregation and reputation related threats such as ID theft, privacy violations, data mining and control of personal information.

• Provide flexibility for presenting multiple digital selves – there is a lack of flexibility of display of the digital self according to the different contexts where the individual evolves. This is especially so with the increasing use of the Internet for informal learning. With learning now situated in multiple spaces, no longer solely institutionally determined, learners are being expected to evolve across multiple learning spheres: their online identity being the bridge between themselves and the place where meaningful lifelong learning is negotiated.

• Reduce conflict between digital identities that cross the boundary of work and play - the development and visibility of an individual’s online identity may conflict with organisational identities and therefore economic, societal, ethical and political issues need to be addressed in what is becoming a new and generalised used of personal information.

Rhizome is coordinated by Steven Warburton, King’s College London. He is the project manager and lead researcher on project theme 3 ‘Identity literacies and competencies’ and theme 4 ‘Interactions between live identities: the social aspects of online identities’.

Margarita Pérez-Garcia, an experienced independent researcher, also forms part of the core project team. She is responsible for theme 1 “the Digital identity landscape’ and theme 2 ‘Functional identities in use’. Within this framework of themes she will be working on the literature review, the mapping and analysis of identity related tools, and the collection via narrative inquiry of stories of the digital self.

Graham Attwell from Pontydysgu completes the team, and leads the work with our stakeholders: responsible for the organisation and animation of the workshops and the awareness campaign.

Do you want to know more about them? Visit the People section in The Rhizome Universe.