As a follow up to my earlier post on roundtables, our professional development program is starting to take shape, although not necessarily in any structured way. Instead, topics have been chosen as need and opportunity arise. In terms of opportunities, we have discovered we have loads of “experts” among our peers and colleagues and I think we are doing a pretty good job of sharing in order to improve our common institutional knowledgebase. So far, we have roundtables scheduled on SAILS, problem-based learning, and creative commons licensing and its applications in T&L. We have also started using our (almost) weekly liaison meetings in part to learn about teaching and learning spaces and technologies of interest to liaisons, such as the newly designed Inquiry and Health Sciences Library classrooms, Articulate Presenter, SMART Boards, presentation and conferencing software such as Elluminate (we currently have a campus-wide site license as a trial) and PowerPoint. The last four sessions have been or will be given by our partners in campus A/V, the Learning Technologies Resource Centre (LTRC), and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences who is responsible for faculty development (among other things). I met a lot of these people at a brown bag lunch series organized by LTRC for various groups on campus who are interested in teaching and learning technologies, so there is a whole lot of sharing going on! Another session of interest was a presentation to the liaisons and the Learning Commons Steering Group by Dr. Phil Wood, the Associate Vice-President, Student Affairs, and Dean of Students, who spoke to liaisons about NSSE and student engagement at McMaster.
All of these sessions have provided us with an opportunity to meet campus partners, and to demonstrate our interest in supporting, and participating in, teaching and learning at McMaster. Oh, and I should mention that the library will be presenting at the Centre for Leadership in Learning’s Learning Technology Symposium, coming up December 7th. Tom Haffie, the “clicker guy” from Western, will be presenting on classroom response systems. How timely! 
