Session 28 - FULL

Title: ePortfolios and Digital Identity in a Web 2.0 World

Session Description:

The vision of the electronic portfolio is rapidly becoming reality, and rapidly evolving at the same time. When your smartphone can capture your ad hoc skills demonstration (or reflection in context), and when you can easily share your media assets on websites like YouTube and Facebook, ePortfolio starts becoming a way of looking at your distributed persona in a digital world, rather than a walled garden in a post-secondary institution. We will look at this phenomenon through the lens of international practice and examples from projects based out of Learning Agents' innovative eStudios in Winnipeg.

Presenter: Don Presant

Don Presant is President of Learning Agents (learningagents.ca), a multimedia production company with a strategic focus on e-learning and ePortfolio. He is also the current Chair of the Manitoba Prior Learning Assessment Network (MPLAN - mbplar.ca).

Don's expertise in multimedia learning resource development is the result of 10 years experience in educational television and over 15 years in computer and Internet technologies. He has developed several successful tools and methods for peer to peer knowledge transfer based on experiential storytelling by practitioners and learners.

Don is the son of a Canadian immigration officer and lived overseas while growing up. His media background began with a BA in Communication Studies at Concordia University. He joined the educational broadcaster TVOntario in 1989 as a video editor and later began writing and directing documentaries.

1n 1993, during a period of fundamental corporate culture change at TVOntario, Don proposed and led the start-up of the Online Group, a self-directed new media "skunk works". In 1994, the Online Group led TVOntario onto the Internet.

Don left TVOntario in 2000 to form Learning Agents, providing multimedia learning resources in English and French for clients and partners such as Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, Industry Canada, Manitoba Labour and Immigration, Red River College, the Manitoba Sector Training Network, and TFO, la télévision éducative et culturelle de l'Ontario français.

Don currently works out of the Learning Agents eStudios, an innovative community telecentre and podcast facility located in downtown Winnipeg.