 Hi everybody it's lovely to meet you all today and I'd like to thank the National Forum for inviting the HECA librarians to participate in this incredible pilot and this wonderfully inspiring and exciting morning. I've actually called this presentation Breaking Barriers. I thought it was very interesting to hear the non-educators describe themselves as interlopers and I guess that's what I'm hinting at is that sometimes as librarians even though we underpin the teaching and learning process with high quality information students are always in the library we empower the research output of an institution somehow we can be kind of invisible in the higher education landscape. I see many reports published on a national macro level about you know strategies on higher education and very rarely do you see librarians mentioned in that and I actually personally feel that this professional development pilot has helped to actually break down this barrier if you like and in a way perhaps this presentation is a closing end to the morning in that I think we've embodied here today the breaking down of silos between different professional groups within the higher education sector. It has already been mentioned we're the HECA librarians so we're private college librarians I've been a librarian for 25 years and I've worked in lots of different libraries like UCD and DIT but for the last 10 years I've been in Dublin Business School in the private higher education sector and sometimes we can be a little bit sort of forgotten if you like or the Cinderella in the higher education group and yet there's incredible as has been witnessed today with Griffith and so forth incredible professional development activities happening research activities happening and we have really impressive libraries within the private college libraries and we're a very significant group in terms of student numbers I mean in Dublin Business School alone we have 9 000 students which is three times the size of some institutes of technology so this is HECA which Anne Mangan mentioned earlier is an Association of Private Higher Education Colleges we have a library committee within that and we work together and we were delighted that the National Forum actually invited us to participate in this pilot and I thought that to me was very dynamic in itself that they didn't just go to the university and the Institute of Technology sector they came knocking on our door on the HECA Librarians door the private college libraries and that was wonderful. Something that really impressed me was on page one and I've read many many documents about education in my 25 years in education and I rarely see the word librarian but on page one so the National Forum got major browning points for this I saw the word librarian library staff plural in fact and I really liked the rationale and I guess this is their rationale for inviting us to be part of this pilot and I really liked it said the PD framework is flexible inclusive and can be interpreted and adapted for academic staff and it goes on to mention technologists and also for library staff so that's fantastic that we've been invited into this professional development space and kudos to the National Forum for that. I recently and why I like the words inclusivity and flexible there why does inclusivity matter why does it matter you know the librarians are in this and the learning technologies that technologists are in this and all the other types of people that work in the profession well it really does matter I saw this interesting quote in Forbes article recently and this is well documented by the way in the academic literature in the library literature in the literature pertaining to education and I like the quote it said if academics the heart of the university do not silo students then why are student focused university departments siloed from each other wouldn't it be better wouldn't students needs be better served if cross-functional sharing of institutional knowledge were common practice within colleges and universities and they had this great headline college silos must die for students to thrive and I personally believe that one of the most powerful outputs from this professional development framework is the breaking down of those silos this is our librarian group and mangan was our expert mentor and is actually the co-founder and program director at the institute of physical therapy and applied science she was absolutely incredible a mine of information contactable at all times by phone email met me regularly for coffee met the group she was absolutely incredible and I'd like to thank Han and also Roshin for their incredible support throughout this pilot and there was 10 librarians involved in the pilot all drawn from the HECA library group which include Griffith College, CCT, Hybernia, Dublin Business School, the National College of Ireland and all kinds of librarians systems librarians head of libraries deputy librarians reader services librarians the whole range of librarians out there some of us also lecture Robert McKenna who's the head of Griffith library he's a lecturer on the MA in education and training at Griffith David Hughes who's systems librarian at DBS and myself we also lecture on the MSc in information and library management at Dublin Business School so it was kind of interesting to have that in the mix as well so how did we get started well we got started with some fantastic advice from Anne Mangan our expert mentor and basically the ultimate goal was to create an e-portfolio map to the typologies and domains and Rob who teaches on the MA in education and training in in Griffith was invaluable because that experience that he had technically also in terms of teaching reflective practice really really kind of guided us a lot and he suggested that we use WordPress as our e-portfolio platform because you retain ownership of WordPress and it's very user friendly and if people do move around across the higher education sector so we could take our e-portfolios with us if we did move on and continue to work on them and then we have a series of workshops where we trained each other on the use of WordPress we have brainstorming sessions we brainstormed about you know how we should approach our portfolios in terms of reflective practice and so we were we were busy bees and the nice thing is that this this this pilot in itself stimulated a huge amount of professional collaboration because the word got out that the heck of librarians were doing these WordPress training sessions and some of the other pilots were saying well we're not sure what platform to use can we come along to your sessions and before we knew it we were running workshops that contained faculty from a variety of institutions across the sector which was a wonderfully empowering and an interesting collaborative experience. Again Rob McCann was very helpful on the reflective end of things and he gave us you know different frameworks we decided we just wouldn't just record our professional development in annual way that we would have a structure that we would describe it we would interpret it we would evaluate it but what would we actually do with it so if we attended a conference what do we learn from it but how do we actually change our practice on the ground so we all agreed that even though we might maybe design a portfolio that looked different from each other we would all adopt this framework for recording our professional development and actually Rob kind of said you can even just use past present future what did you learn what are you doing now and how are you going to change your practice in the future. Ann Mangas gave our expert mentor gave us a wonderful exercise to do in terms of reflecting on our educational elements as librarians you know the element of our role that's educational and so we did this kind of brainstorming session and here are some of the groups brainstorming sessions so we mentor faculty and students we do inductions we a lot of us sit on validation panels we write a documents for QQI we're immersed in teaching and learning all the time here are some more lecture inductions building digital capacity I think librarians have a huge role to play in helping students to be digitally literate faculty to be digitally literate and that's a goal of the national forum if you've seen their digital roadmap that's a goal and it continues on here you know we have a lot of technical expertise mentoring online resources that you use every day to prepare your lectures we are completely linked to teaching and learning here's some of our wordpress workshops intense concentration there they were fantastic we've always been a very close group all the HECA librarians because we have our own HECA library committee but I think it really kind of bonded us together and it's been wonderful in that respect at one point Roshin asked me Marie would you give me a quote for something that I'm writing up about what is your experience of this pilot so far and of the professional development framework itself so I'm not going to bore you with the whole quote but I just felt that it's a tool this these are my words that allows me to apply self-reflection in order to reap the full and practical benefits of my continuing professional development additionally it provides a user friendly framework to categorize manage and disseminate this professional development activity in a consistent and transparent way across the sector but another thing that I liked about it is that it also helped us to reflect on the pedagogical aspects of our work as librarians well what do the other members in the group think well again we felt that actually the domains in the categories you know you've got the digital the self the professional collaboration we felt that they were very flexible in terms of capturing what we do and we as librarians do a lot of professional development where professional development junkies were always at conferences blogging journal articles you name it a lot of us felt that the professional development framework made us feel closer to the wider higher educational sector we felt suddenly a lot more sort of meshed with other professionals in the sector we felt it actually increased awareness of what we do there's an awful lot of misconceptions and stereotypes around librarianship that you know we stamp books all day long when now we are you know publishing journals and hosting online platforms and teaching classes we also felt that you know it encouraged us to be more reflective I don't think we have as much of a reflective tradition as many of you would have as teachers and and we felt that we kind of tapped into that and we definitely felt there was enhanced professional collaboration as a result of the pilot but most importantly we also felt that it did help us within our own institutions even just saying you know if I said to some of the senior managers you know I'm involved in this national professional development pilot along with the heck of librarians I'm kind of very interested and it even sort of broke down some barriers internally within institutions we've got had lots of kind of welcome benefits we have a youtube video there that Rob McKenna created he's been incredible during the pilot on how you create an e-portfolio out of WordPress check it out and Mary Buckley who's the librarian in the National College of Ireland incredibly dynamic librarian really thinks outside of the box she said you know what I think a great idea at the end of all this is that we set up one blog for all the heck of libraries it's a professional development blog and we all enter our professional development on it and then we have this one space where you can see the incredible range of professional development activity that we're doing and that's what we are going to do as an immediate project literally starting next week Mary has already been working on this and the other thing that's happened is is is the institutes of technology some of them are now doing this professional development framework pilot DIT and others and they actually approached us and said you know we hear you've done the pilot can we meet with you we'd like to hear your experiences so here's the benefits of professional collaboration of the actual framework already here we are at the end of our pilot reflecting and for me the actual pilot was an important cpd exercise in itself we learned new digital skills we collaborated professionally with a wide range of educators and and and so forth and we also thought about ourselves I really liked that aspect of the framework the self and so forth so I just quickly show you a couple of examples and then some of my team members the pilot members are going to come up and just say a couple of lines each so here's Dimfna's Dimfna is deputy librarian in Griffith College she created this incredible portfolio they all look different even though they're all used with wordpress just her presentation we thought was particularly slick very visual describing different activities that she's been doing here was a piece of professional development where she was teaching classes online resources and you can see she reflects on it what she learned from it what she's going to change as a result of it the the benefits of this piece of professional development but she also had kind of smaller more reflective pieces which are kind of reminiscent of the self aspect of this framework in which she was kind of talking you know how am I actually going to record my entries on this and she even contemplates on that and captures that in her portfolio which I really liked this is Audrey in um Hibernia she's the librarian Audrey Geherty she's the librarian in Hibernia she blew us away with the pilot because she was really good on capturing the informal professional development in fact she quite frightened us she had a diary and every time she even had a coffee break and she just got something to do with work she wrote it in the diary and we were thinking wow this is incredible and but the benefits you can see straight away even books that she borrowed from the library she wrote an entry on that it's an ad hoc piece of professional development she borrowed some books on big data um on digital literacy but she reflected on it and what did she learn from it and what was she going to change from it so so we really thought Audrey bought an awful lot to the table in making us aware of those smaller pieces of professional development that you do every day and you don't even think about it um and she also actually reflected on the pilot itself she had an entry up about the pilot itself and she said you know there's no right or wrong way to reflect or to record professional development everybody approaches teaching and learning differently and it's okay making time for cpd is tricky but it's worthwhile technology is a great enabler start with the student when teaching don't be afraid invest in yourself so there was so many diverse and so many rich entries on these portfolios and this is just a handful there was 10 people in this pilot this is Jane Buggles she's the deputy librarian at Dublin Business School she's an absolute powerhouse she has about 62 different hats she's a senior editor on a journal that we published that has recently just been listed on an ebsco international database she's responsible for learner supports in Dublin Business School as well as being deputy librarian and this was her professional development pilot and she attended the HECA conference we had people from Peter Cassel's all kinds of higher education luminaries contemplating the future of education and she wrote a reflective piece on that um she has great images and graphics as well this is a journal we publish a journal called studies in arts and humanities it's listed on an ebsco international database it's cross-institutional we accept submissions from across the sector if any of you are interested and Jane is a senior editor on that and we have an advisory board meeting we have advisory board members you know people from ucc trinity private college sector everywhere and that was her reflection on the advisory the annual advisory board meeting uh so that's basically it it's been an incredible experience and we feel honoured to have been a part of it and we really want to thank Ann and Roshin and all of the national forum and it's a real honour and a pleasure to meet you all and i'd just like to ask up my team members and they're just each going to say a line or two on the pilot and then we get to eat that's the good news and thank you for your time thank you hi everybody Audrey Garrity from hibernia college i'd like to tell my story just in steps and we started in january i guess on the top step with a Kickstarter workshop which most of you will have experienced and very informative incredibly daunting then we took a step down and we were dealing with our hecka librarian team which was incredibly supportive as we set about actually getting our heads around how we were going to get this and achieve this project the final step we had to take was on our own to reach ground level where we had to think about what we were actually going to record and as marie alluded to i did get a little obsessed with them circles and red pen in cpd activity and all of a sudden when i hit the ground i was actually running away because i was thinking how am i going to record all of this activity so thankfully we got back up onto this step again with the team and we agreed on our e-portfolio format and as we gradually did our training and interacted with each other and spoke about our fears and our expectations we felt more confident to progress together and i cannot stress enough the importance of the collaborative element of the project certainly from my point of view so june came and we reached our show and tell stage amongst the group and i'm sure you all felt similar in that everybody else's project looks so much better than your own the reality of it was they don't they all look different and one thing i learned that's okay to be different in this case and in all cases finally then we went back up onto the top step where we started we had to release our portfolios to the national forum and to let them fly and just to finish off here today with all of you armed now with your digital badges i think we're all jumping off the step and we're going into that balloon where the boy and girl in the balloon and in terms of cpd i think for everybody the sky is the limit and thanks to everyone who's been involved in this hi how you go hi sorry microphone how you doing i'm just going to say a couple of words we're all just going to say a couple of points each and what we got from the project i am my name is dimfna and i'm with griffith college the point i just want to make is one that's been said all day i think it's repeated again and again it's the collaborative nature of it i just think that was really empowering i have to say and one of the things i would take away from this experience is looking at the relationships that i already have within faculty and cross faculty and having a little bit more respect for that actually and acknowledging that a little bit more and aiming it a little bit more and also one of the other things i got from it was be much more proactive in reaching out and looking for help and making contact with people for expertise and opinions on maybe some of the work i'll be doing and have more conversations there and i have to say for me that that was a fantastic experience altogether okay thank you hi everyone my name is david hughes and i'm the Systems Library and at Dublin Business School and initially when i was coerced for one to a better word into joining this pilot i was initially very skeptical but i had a great time working with my my colleagues and other institutions and i suppose as an introvert what i got most of was domain one the self um dbs a very small but very busy library and you spend a lot of time doing things there's a little time for reflection but having sat down thought about things a lot of the things that i do are interactions with students and staff and all of those interactions are teachable moments so like the nuig experienced academics i had a light bulb moment i'm not just a librarian and a doer i'm a teacher as well and in order to be an effective teacher i need to be an effective learner and that's what i've got most out of the pdf pilot which i really enjoyed thank you hi i'm justin smith i'm the librarian in cct college dublin um so much has been said already by my colleagues and i echoed that and second that but one of the things that really came through uh the framework for me was the communicative element of it with with students the librarians your midway in a sense between faculty and students and very often what gets lost in that is what the students can can tell you what the students can teach you in your interactions with them and the way that the framework was designed and the way that we were forced to collaborate are not forced sorry but we were encouraged to collaborate encouraged to collaborate made me reflect on that much more deeply and it speaks to the design of the framework and to the excellence of my colleagues on the uh HECA library um committee that we that we have formed that uh i really learned much more about my job and it's a reciprocal process and it's an ongoing process so it doesn't end here uh as we've discussed so thank you uh hello hello i'm mary buckley you'd be glad to know i'm the last um just to say um i joined the HECA librarians this year and i went to my first meeting and it was about the pilot and as justin just said it was um we were encouraged to get in to get in to get involved and it was great um i'm just going to finish off by saying as a librarian when you start something you get to the end of it and then you say what's next so for us it was what are we going to do after this so at our last meeting which we have a picture of above we've decided we're going to go with a collaborative blog so that's what we're going to do the next step for us as librarians is to have a collaborative blog between us as a group um we're not sure what's what kind of form it's going to take yet i don't think it's um the item on our next agenda the main one um but the next time we meet we hope we'll be able to show you what our collaborative blog looks like because none of us had the same portfolio so it's going to be a very interesting negotiation thank you very much