Festival of Learning

I have the distinct privilege and honour of belonging to the most amazing learning organization - The Nova Scotia Community College. This past Thursday the most amazing event took place at our Truro campus. The College celebrated its first Festival of Learning, a day to share and celebrate the learning happening at the College. Colleagues presented on what they had learned, how they had learned and the transformations that occurred through their learning. The presentations were diverse and amazing in their power and quality.

I was asked to participate in a "Learning Market", where various presenters set up in a market stall sort of fashion and presented what they had done over lunch. My presentation was on my experience with conference blogging at STLHE 2007 (see my June posts).

What is conference blogging you say? Well it's blogging a conference while you are there - I find it to be a great reflective tool and a good way to share my conference experiences. When NSCC sends someone to an event or conference, they return to the College and share what they have learned - by blogging while at the conference, I find it more immediate and relevant, and the sharing begins before I even get home!

But enough about me - the festival was amazing - I have never seen so many engaged, energized, and passionate learners in one place - and the very cool thing is that as a presenter I learned more than most of the people who dropped by my display - I got to explain and contextualize what I did and got some great ideas on how to make it even better - so cool.

The other major event of the day was the graduation of the CCEDP (Community College Education Diploma Program) class. CCEDP is NSCC's staff and faculty development program and it is absolutely transformational. I have a MEd in Adult Education and Training and I learned more from the CCEDP program that I could actually use in the classroom than I ever did from grad school. There were 40 grads from the program. Here is a picture of those who attended the convocation. Congratulations to all of you!

New faculty orientation was also held this week in Truro, so 33 new faculty members from all across the College came together for a week of orientation and introductions. To all of you, welcome to NSCC, you have made a great choice - I look forward to working with all of you.

What an amazing day! As educators we so rarely get an opportunity to get together and share what we do, and what an opportunity the festival was, and perfect timing too - now we can take all of that energy and enthusiasm into a new academic year - the possibilities are endless!

I'd like to thank all of those who organized, setup, managed, ran, facilitated, presented, attended, and made the festival such a success, but I really want to thank my friend, my mentor, my colleague Libby for asking me to be a part of such an incredible day and Bobbi for all of her creativity and vision in making such an amazing day happen. Thanks Libby!! Thanks Bobbi!!...