Thursday, February 22, 2007

Personal Learning Environments and OpenID

I had a short discussion with Wolfgang Neuhaus on OpenID and Personal Learning Environments (PLE). In an earlier post I wrote “we don´t need a trusted site that supports OpenID and acts as an identity provider, our PLEs will be our identities”. Wolfgang then asked me "What does that mean? If I use all the different services of my PLE, how do I login to each one without OpenID? I want to forget this huge package of passwords that I am carryíng around all the time …".
My answer to Wolfgang´s question was that a URL is one type of identifiers that can be used with OpenID, so why not to use the link to a PLE -which should be unique- to login on all OpenID-enabled sites? The identity provider in this case would act similar to UDDI registry for Web Services. That is, we just need to register the link to our PLE to what I would call “OpenID registry” or "PLE registry".

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

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