Building Personal Brands with Digital Storytelling ePortfolios
Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” This article presents a pedagogical approach for framing a digital-identity-enhancing ePortfolio that maximizes student engagement and produces a high-quality ePortfolio artifact. Building on the work of Lambert (2002), Barrett (2005), Klein (2013), Ramirez (2011), Nguyen (2013), Kahn (2014), Khedher (2014) and others, the authors have developed a technology- and pedagogy-based digital storytelling ePortfolio framework that helps students craft a digital identity and communicate a personal brand. When ePortfolio assignments provide opportunities for self-exploration that include creating a personal brand, students engage with and appreciate the importance of their work, as evidenced in our pilot study of second- through fourth-year students in a university honors colloquium. Furthermore, this personal branding approach extends existing ePortfolio models by helping students develop key twenty-first century metaskills (Neumeier, 2013), while also enhancing their human and social capital.
