Simon Grant of CETIS

Lisa Gray arranged an afternoon workshop for e-portfolio projects interested in LEAP 2.0 at the JISC e-Learning Programme event on 2008-03-12 at Aston.

Nine project delegates attended, and we split into four small groups of pairs of projects. I asked each pair to explain their practice to each other, to consider how their systems might possibly work together, and then to come up with

• next steps they will take
• challenges they envisage
• support they might want

in their progress towards interoperability.

Because of the range of projects represented, and their wide range of situations, the answers to these covered a good range and had many valuable points. Here are a few issues which came up.

• How is this spec any better than or different from previous ones?
• Ownership of and responsibility for the information held.
• Security (various aspects of this).
• Shared development of Open Source systems and tools, for e.g. validation (of syntax); verification (of information presented).
• Transfer of permissions between systems.
• Interfacing with systems (such as e-Learning / MIS / student information systems) from various vendors.

Related to these, the support we (variously CETIS and/or JISC) can offer could include:

• Making the new specifications available
• Supporting work on common tools and services (as above)
• Supporting common ontologies
• Getting vendors on board
• Dissemination of what is possible

This was a smart collection of delegates, and they even seemed to enjoy the process! One of the lessons I take back with me is that this approach - getting people to work in pairs as if they had been asked to implement some kind of interoperability between their systems - is very productive: I’ll do it again given the chance. I think it puts people in just the right frame of mind. Everyone gets to explain what their system does to another highly informed person who doesn’t know much about it, and talk about interoperability is grounded in practice, rather than in abstract (and too often, futile) discussions of the conceptual structure of the interoperability specification.

Just one thing - try to match people/projects up so they have as much as possible in common. I prepared this, but had to rearrange on the spot when one person was absent.

Catching up on blog entries this morning I notice one from Joanna Bawa reproducing one from Andrew Hinton which refers to Alan Cooper’s “The Origin of Personas“. Now particularly because I have been closely associated with the usability and HCI community, I need to take account of how that community uses words. The Andrew Hinton piece clearly implies a usage of the term ‘persona’ to mean some kind of representative fictional character, stereotype or archetype who might use some software, or perhaps be engaged in a wider process - some character thought about and designed for. At the bottom of the article there are some links to other very interesting writings on the topic. People have come in and grabbed the term ‘persona’, uncompromisingly. Time to escape. Oh woe - the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”!

And I see why, as well. A ‘persona’, being originally a mask, can be worn by more than one person. It can be seen more like a role. The depersonalized persona?

In contrast, what I have been trying to get at in previous writings (other posts here and here) has been something much more intensely personal. It is the set of typical behaviours of a particular individual in a particular context or setting, along with their values in that setting, their attitudes, their propensities. It’s so close to the idea of identity that I was calling them identities for a while, before I admitted that the term ‘identity’ was too firmly entrenched in the realm of those who write software to check that only those allowed somewhere can get in.

Then this January came a new book, “Multiplicity”, from Rita Carter, which simply uses the term ‘personality’, indeed, making a virtue of the connection with multiple personality disorders. You could class it as popular psychology if you like, but in any case I think it is very worthwhile. Of all the people who have discussed matters in this area, Rita Carter is the one who comes closest to identifying just what it is that I regard as so important. The main thing that she does not go into as much as I would have liked is personal values, which to me are very clearly a function of the personality (in her multiplicitous sense), not the individual.

Addendum: Carter suggests this as a short definition of personality: “a coherent and characteristic way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and behaving.”

The most recent paper I have written much of, presented in the Medev event in Newcastle recently, does talk about professional identity, and fleetingly uses the term persona, but dwells more on what is really personal. Is it time to move on, led by Rita Carter, and switch term from ‘persona’ to ‘personality’?

When we saw the initial announcement, it looked like a good thing to go to, as it overlaps areas of keen interest. So Helen, Scott and I had written the paper - Social portfolios supporting professional identity - and Helen and I went along to the one-day conference in Newcastle organised by Medev. It was a good day.

Why, then, have I been hesitating to write a blog entry about it? The usual good lot of people were there, including a pleasing number of those I didn’t know. The proceedings were printed admirably. The food, the arrangements, were all very good. Even our paper went down well (OK, actually it was the presentation, not the paper, which had some, what shall we say, interesting content). There was some very stimulating discussion around that.

And I’m sure it was very interesting and useful to many. But to me, the interest and use was in the networking, which one can’t really blog about so easily, as it is much more personal. The presentations were all worthy, but perhaps one may be forgiven for not remembering much that stood out as being different from the many other portfolio conferences that some of us have been to.