Domains, Personal APIs, and Portfolios

Introduction

In addition to the traditional educational experience students at Brigham Young University receive, we want them to acquire skills, techniques, and tools that facilitate their current and future learning. We believe students should learn how to control and own their digital identity, content, and personal data. With this goal in mind we have initiated a pilot program using a concept known as Domain of Ones Own. We hope to accomplish several goals using this concept and associated training:

  1. Teach students, faculty, and staff why they should care about owning, controlling, and appropriately sharing their online identity, the content that defines them, and their personal information.
  2. Help individuals understand how to choose a domain name that accurately and professionally represents them to others.
  3. Encourage members of our community to not simply consume, but contribute to the body of knowledge through the use of blogs and social media.
  4. Support individuals in publishing a Personal API (i.e. api.example.com) that allows the owner to authorize others to interact with their personal information and revoke access privileges as desired.
  5. Support students and faculty in creating a portfolio (i.e. api.example.com/portfolio) as part of their Personal API that is owned and maintained by the individual owner, and yet enables the owner to authorize others to consume, contribute to, and evaluate their collection.

Domain of Ones Own

Many members of our community share their pictures, memories, thoughts, insights, and writings on social media sites that are controlled by others. The privacy policies of these sites change over time, access privileges may change, copyright ownership is a concern, and the look and feel desired by the content owner may change without their knowledge, input, or control. Contributors have no control over the amount or type of advertising placed around or even over their content. In many cases they may not be able to easily move their content to other providers, remove content they no longer wish to share, or even pass ownership onto others as desired. We want members of the BYU community to understand that there is a better way.

Consequently, we have chosen to use and teach a concept known as Domain of Ones Own. We first herd about Domain of Ones Own from Jim Groom when he was at the University of Mary Washington. After a visit we were hooked on the idea of freeing our community and using the tool to rethink content ownership, Personal APIs, portfolios, and Learning Management Systems.

Our implementation of a Domain of Ones Own consists of a simple hosted server configured using cPanel and pointed to by the end-user’s chosen domain. We are using the service and tools provided by Reclaim Hosting who provides the tools, hosting, and the process for acquiring domains. With the default, initial configuration domain owners have a blog driven by the Known blogging tool. While this is a great introduction that allows domain owners to contribute immediately, the system is open and can grow as the domain owner’s sophistication increases. The system allows users to set up subdomains, email servers, database servers, and install and run many LAMP stack based applications. The tools and services have been chosen carefully to allow users to move their domain and associated content to other providers easily. Tools were chosen to be immediately useful, provide future flexibility, and help users learn introductory system administration skills that are critical to understanding the world they are in and will inherit.

Domains

We believe every individual should own and control their domain. Choosing an appropriate domain is important. In many cases the domain will be used in a professional capacity for years, perhaps for life. We are creating instructional material, including short video segments, which will give advice on how to choose well. We intend to create these materials in a way that minimizes branding and IP protection so others can easily use them for similar purposes at their institutions.

Personal API and Portfolios

Imagine a world where other sites on the web don’t hold your personal data, but instead request access to the data they need through your Personal API. Perhaps you grant them access to only the portions they actually need and restrict them from others. They use the resources they’ve been authorized to access, perform the business functions you desire, return results, and their access is revoked.

For example, imagine you work for weLovePrivacy.com and it’s payday. The payroll system springs to life and determines how much you should be paid this month. However, it needs to know how much should be withheld for taxes, how much pretax contributions to make, where these should be made, where you want your money deposited, etc. In a traditional system all of this information is centrally held. This centrally held information compels the institution to create systems to enable you to manipulate it, and makes the company liable for any loss of this data. On the other hand, you are depending on the institution safeguarding your personal information and not using it for nefarious purposes, a dangerous assumption.

However, there is a better way. Imagine the payroll system interacts with your Personal API to obtain your social security number, the number of exemptions you are declaring, the name of your 401k vendor, 401k account number, your checking account provider and account number, etc. The institutional system does the computation and disbursements, and your Personal API revokes access to these resources until the next time they are needed. While the institution could store the collected information it may not be in their best interest to do so and could even be released to them with the understanding it is to be used for the sole purpose disclosed to the user.

While it may be a while before ERP administrators are comfortable getting employee data from their personal API, there are plenty of other scenarios where a personal API is useful. Portfolios is an example of such a scenario. An instructor at an institution requests authorization to place assignments into your Personal Portfolio, their request is granted, and the assignments are deposited. You perform learning activities that generate solutions to the assignment, and deposit these in your portfolio. You have authorized the instructor to see them and place their critiques back into your portfolio. Since this is your portfolio it moves with you from one part of your life to another, from one institution to another, etc. It is yours to use and share as you choose.

Summary

It is time for learners to take control of their content, artifacts of education, and personal information. Our desire and intent is to teach these principles to our community and give them the necessary tools. We hope to do so in a way that others can easily use and benefit from.

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