This week, several of us are attending the JISC / CNI conference in Belfast. The theme of the conference is transforming the user experience. Whilst there are no specific sessions on identity management, it is an issue that keeps of creeping in to presentations.

Diana Oblinger opened the conference with an insightful presentation on Students and the Transformation of Higher Education. Diana set out a transforming approach to learning and teaching within education, which is bringing about a greater focus on collaborative learning and collaborative research. In her vision for education, she saw students and staff moving away from a reliance on single institutional affiliation and having a learning and teaching experience across multiple institutions and environments. In order to manage this vision, it will be important for us to move away from the current identity provision model that is reliant on the affiliation managing identities for their staff and student. The next step for identity management in higher education will be the tools that allow us to add our institutional affiliation rights to a more transferable identity. A big question is where will this identity be managed and by who?

Ian Rowlings’ presentation on the digital lives project matches neatly to conversations we have previously had here about the importance of managing the multiple personas we hold online. The digital lives project focuses on the need to bring together personal digital collections, but many of the questions explored by the project are equally relevant to manage digital identity itself.

I’ll keep on updating this post as the event goes on, but so far a lot of food for thought for the new access and identity management programme.