Incorporating Technology into Extension

I mentioned yesterday that I am taking a course on using technology in teaching and extension.  The course has been helpful in a number of ways. 

First, it's helped me to realize that some of the technology I use regularly in my personal life for entertainment can actually be helpful in my professional life as a horticulture agent.  By this I mean things like blogging and twitter.  As I said, I've used both of these, especially twitter, extensively outside of work, but have never really tried to use them for work.  I think part of that comes from not entirely understanding the professional applications of the technology and part of it comes from an uncertainty of how the clients I typically deal with would react.  As a horticulture agent, most of my clients are fifty or older and while most use computers for basic functions like email, it's hard to know how many pay attention to blogs and twitter.  When I initially started this blog 5 years ago, I quickly got discouraged because it didn't seem like anyone was reading it and therefore felt like a waste of time.  Now, however, more of my target clients are on Facebook and it seems to be a little easier to connect with them online, so I hope that this experiment will be successful.  We also have a lot of discussions in extension on how to engage young people and get them interested in things like gardening and farming and we need to realize that technology is one of our best tools to make this connection. 

I've also been exposed to some new technology that I believe will be helpful.  A few weeks ago we had a lesson on Prezi, a presentation software, which is a tool my wife, a teacher, has been encouraging me to try for a few years.  Extension agents always seem to rely on Powerpoint in their classes and while Powerpoint is certainly useful, I sometimes feel as if it is a bit too linear and perhaps the people I'm teaching get a bit bored with its predictability.  Prezi operates a little differently, has a different look then Powerpoint, and presentations in Prezi don't quite have the same linear, straight forward feel that Powerpoints often do.  Animoto, another application that my wife has reaved about, was the subject of our most recent lesson.  I had a little bit of experience with this but not much.  Like Prezi, I see it as a different way to present information rather then always relying on Powerpoint presentations, although Animoto seems better suited to short presentations (around 5-10 minutes, or less) whereas Prezi is appropriate for longer presentations. 

Finally, for our class project I've been exploring Scoop.it, which is an application that lets users search and select online articles, videos, and blogs and act as curators by hosting the most informative and relevant of those selections on a unique website which they can then share with their followers.  I've experimented quite a bit with this, creating sites on home vegetable gardening and strawberry production which I'll share once the project has been completed.

My triumphant return

Well it's been ages since I've posted anything here, but I feel that it's time to end my extended hiatus.  I hope to start posting here more frequently- we'll see if that actually happens.  At the very least I figure I can manage more than once every five years!

The impetus for reviving this blog is a class I'm taking at NC State, AEE 526- Information Technologies in Agricultural and Extension Education.  The objective of the course is to become more familiar with web and mobile technologies and to understand their potential applications in extension and education.  One of our assignments is to experiment with blogging and twitter.  I have used twitter fairly extensively personally, but not at all in my professional life as an extension agent until the last week or so (follow me at @halifaxgardens if you'd like).  I haven't really blogged at all, other than the handful of posts here many years ago, but I read numerous blogs daily, mostly music, sports, and entertainment blogs however, so it will be interesting for me to explore this from the professional side.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a garden club about native plants.  I briefly listed some general advantages of using natives in landscaping and talked a bit about some myths associated with natives, but I spent most of my time discussing specific native plants that I love, most of which I argued were not used enough in modern landscaping.  These included plants like Spicebush (Lindera benzoin), Strawberry bush (Eounymous americanus), and various viburnums (I really have a thing for viburnums. As the great horticulturalist Michael Dirr said, "a garden without a viburnum is like life without music and art").  The last plant I talked about was one called Indian Pink (Spigelia marilandica).  This is a plant that I have never actually grown, but have coveted for years after discovering it in the Plant Delights Nursery catalog.  Plant Delights is a wonderful nursery for rare perennials, both native and exotic, and is located just outside of Raleigh.  I fell in love with this particular plant after seeing the picture in the catalog and reading its description. However, I lamented to the garden club, I've never been able to buy it because Plant Delights is the only place I know of that sells it and every time I've been there it has been sold out.  Clearly I'm not the only one who fell in love with this plant after seeing it in the catalog.  Sure, Plant Delights does mail order sales as well and I guess I could go that route, but it seems silly to mail order something from a business that is only a 45 minute drive from my house.  Alas, I told them, I would have to continue chasing this plant until one day I could finally add it to my garden.

Yesterday, completely out of the blue, one of my Master Gardeners, who also happens to be a member of the garden club I spoke to that day, stopped by my office to say hello.  As she handed me a small black pot, she told me that she had been to Plant Delights the weekend before and she had bought me my plant.  It was snowing while she was there and there were only six of the Spigelias left and they were only barely poking of the soil after a winter of dormancy, but she knew she would make my day if she bought one for me.  So now I have my very own Spigelia marilandica.  All I have to do is keep it indoors for a few more weeks, then gradually start exposing it to the outdoors to harden it off, and find the perfect spot to plant it.  It is days like yesterday that remind me why I enjoy my job and why gardeners are wonderful people to have as friends.  Thank you Ellen!

When I said it was just barely poking out of the soil, I wasn't kidding.  Here's to a life of vigorous growth and prolific blooms.