I enjoyed reading Andy Powell's reflections on Bunfight at the Athens/Shibboleth gateway, which reflected on the problems being faced by Eduserve and JISC as they confront issues surrounding the changes currently faced by the UK educational sector concerning authenticated access to online services and resources.
It got me to wondering (as I do from time-to-time) do we actually need all the authentication that we actually put up in UK education? The National Library of Congress in the US has made a range of image resources available via Flickr, a Web 2.o image sharing site which is often blocked by many educational institutions in the UK. If resources need to be kept 'UK' only then the BBC has demonstrated that content can be made accessible to the UK only by various negotiations with various ISPs . One argument that is used is that the UK taxpayer cannot fund educational access for the whole world but the Congress/Flickr project shows a different approach to how content can be shared but costs can be kept low since Flickr is the host but the Library controls the content. In the content sharing of world of Web 2.0 are we in danger of creating 'content silos' with a large scale use of authentication, which are isolated islands of useful but difficult to reach resources and consequently limiting learners, tutors and researchers? Instead we could see content being used in all sorts of places on the Web by learners that are currently out of reach.
Some authentication is needed if we want personalisation, for example although I can browse National Library of Congress images on Flickr I need an account to bookmark them as favourites etc. This level of authentication makes sense but in terms of publicly funded resources maybe it is time for wider debate of not which system of authentication should be used but whether it should be there at all?
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