Blogging from academia, Brian Lamb of abject learning writes about the Web 2.0 nightmare for personal data from the perspective of college faculty. He tells us that for the sake of protecting privacy, “the effect has been a common perception that telling students to set up accounts on Flickr or Wordpress represents a potential breach of the law . . . .” This seems to me another of those inexplicable barriers old school education has erected against the new generation’s use in learning of the the smart mob tools that are ingrained into their way of life. More of Brian’s analysis:

As 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?”

I’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 Canadian-based hosting for RefWorks.)

So 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.