Curating Professional Development

I have been participating in the eCampus Ontario ExtendmOOC for more than a month now and we just reached the halfway point. There’s six modules and the third we just finished focused on curation. I enjoyed this module the most so far because I love thinking about curation strategies and how curation applies to many aspects of education. 

What I have been thinking about for the past few days is how one curates their professional development and how important curation and PD is for everything we do in higher education. It is important that faculty and staff feel they can access the professional development that will best compliment their pedagogical goals. As a committed life long learner, I know I’m always seeking out opportunities to learn new things or apply what I already know. 

One of the ways I work on my professional development is through conferences and when I reflect on these experiences I can say that I have curated a great set of resources and developed a wonderful personal learning network. Twitter is also another form of curated professional development for the people I follow all have wonderful ideas about learning to share.

It is important for departments to think about the professional development of their staff in terms of curation as well, for that way you can ensure that holistically the department represents inclusive engaged learning with many points of access. The great thing is that professional development can look like a lot of different things to different people and the more we encourage this in our educational environments the more we will all grow as learners.