EduGlu Sandbox

pa href="http://openidexplained.com/"img src="http://openidexplained.com/images/food-mart.png" border="0"/a/p

pI'm not sure how many of our friends to the south are aware of this, but using web services hosted in the United States is deemed to be a threat to the rights of Canadian students. /p

pIndeed, a public institution such as the one I work for is expected to take 'rigorous measures' to "a href="http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-80030"mitigate against illegal and surreptitious access/a" of students' private data. What that means has been left open to interpretation, but apparently a student's email address can constitute private data, and the effect has been a common perception that telling students to set up accounts on Flickr or Wordpress.com represents a potential breach of the law. In the absence of a clear sense of what can and cannot be done, our old friends Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt become the default policy drivers./p

pI haven't heard the groovy President-elect say anything about revoking the PATRIOT Act (then again, I don't have cable TV, maybe he said it on Larry King), so I'm not expecting change I can or cannot believe in. /p

pAs someone who would like to see higher education tapping more of the fine online applications available outside the academy, and who intuitively favours a platform-agnostic, let-the-students-decide approach to tool selection, the personal privacy issue has been something of a showstopper. I can't tell you how many times I have known of some free, popular online service that could meet a specific need quickly and easily, only to be shot down by the question "is it hosted in Canada?"/p

pI'm kind of surprised some company hasn't set up some sort of subscription-based proxy or hosting service for US-based apps to protect private data. The higher education market in Canada alone would be substantial. (As usual, the librarians have moved ahead on this, for example by setting up a href="http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/AskAway/2007/05/refworks_canadian_server.html"Canadian-based hosting for RefWorks/a.)/p

pSo I have this naive idea that wider adoption of OpenID might alleviate this problem. Not every service accepts OpenID, but lots of good ones do. I don't know whether we should look into becoming OpenID providers ourselves, but at the very least, perhaps we can back a trusted Canadian-based OpenID provider so student data stays in the Great White North./p

pI've asked around, and am not sure whether I should be pushing this or not. a href="http://edtechpost.ca/wordpress/"Scott/a, while assuring me this wasn't an idiotic idea, also cautioned me that this would not necessarily be easy to do... Then, as he often does, he said a bunch of smart stuff I didn't really understand./p

pThen I run into the problem of explaining how OpenID works to the people I would need to support such a plan. To address this particular challenge, I was grateful to come across a href="http://openidexplained.com/"OpenID Explained/a, a very nifty tutorial - now, can I get people to look at it.../p

pIf I haven't made my fuzziness clear, rest assured I would grateful for feedback on any of the above./pdiv class="feedflare"
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