Persistent Identity (or not)

Catherine Howell's reply to Andrew Middleton raised the idea of persistent identity, to which Stephen Downes responded :
[quoting Howell]  "persistence creates the illusion of fixed identity, whereas higher education explicitly conceptualises its mission as formative and processual." Well, sure, you grow and develop when you learn, but you don't change your name. You can keep a persistent identity even as you grown.
I reject the notion that seems to be implicit in Howell's comment that as learners we are unformed prior to a process, and then are 'finished' (my word) and at that point would want a stable identity. I believe I am continuing to grow as a learner and that my responsibility to myself and to you the reader is to connect my current self to my past selves and to explain how I understand the evolution.  In "The Social Life of Learning: How can Continuing Education be Reconfigured in the Future," John Seely Brown talks about a spectacular failure and what he learned from it. He connects to failure associated with his past identity.

But I digress, the thrust of this post is about identity. I had been thinking that one of the strengths of a university portfolio offering was that the university was in a position to offer a stable identity and to certify that the identity had certain credentials. That would put the university in the interesting role of guarantor of a person's identity -- not a role to accept lightly.

Which gives me several questions: How do you know my identity? How to I conserve it over time? Why is this important?

Its important because, with persistent identity comes the ability to build reputation, and with that comes the ability to navigate communities of practice.

How might it work? Our students come to us with identities already established on multiple systems: email, IM, gaming. Unlike me, most of them do not have the same user ID across the systems they use. So, how do I know that "fratboy" on aol and "cougar21" at Washington State University are the same individual (and, for that matter, how do you know that nils_peterson at Educause is nils_peterson at WSU)?. How is it that I am convinced of the claim that all the elements in multiple portfolios are indeed the work of the same individual?

In a course design meeting today we came to something of an answer. We were talking about assignments that had students extending an entry on Wikipedia.  Lets say the student has a university identity that differs from their Wikipedia identity. In the university identity the student built up an evidentiary trail as they prepared to edit Wikipedia, posting and analyzing resources, other authors, previous diffs of the Wikipedia entry, and drafts of their proposed new version of the Wikipedia entry. There might be comments and other critique from fellow learners in this preparatory work. Now, using the Wikipedia identity, the student makes the edit. And then, again using the university identity they write a reflection about the process, what they think the diff shows about them as a student of the topic, what the subsequent diff when their work is edited means, etc. I, as a reader of all this, could make a decision about the likelihood of the student's claim to be both identities.

So, where I had been thinking that a single persistent identity was essential, I can now see that for each of a person's communities of discourse a different (but stable) identity might be workable, and also a way that multiple identities, with varying levels of persistence, can be woven together to provide a picture of a single individual across communities.