Extension Online News, a web-only publication presented in blog format, highlights development in North Carolina Cooperative Extension. Written primarily for Cooperative Extension employees, it is also accessible on the web to anyone with an interest and an internet connection. Applying two of the principles we learned this semester will improve this blog: attention to audience and attention to navigational details.

AUDIENCE

Online News strives to reach two distinct audiences:

• an internal audience of Extension professionals
• an external audience of North Carolina citizens interested in Extension programs and services

Cooperative Extension professionals form the internal audience for Online News. Some provide expertise in poultry science. Others educate North Carolina citizens about the environment or family safety and health. They each bring a specific and diverse body of knowledge to their work. They are also separated by geography, since Cooperative Extension supports an office in each county across the state.

Cooperative Extension also strives to reach an external audience with the Online News blog: all the citizens of North Carolina. Citizens visiting the blog might be interested in a particular program in their county or in a special award given to their agent. This set of readers could have any combination of educational and cultural backgrounds that might be completely different from those of the Extension professionals.

Because the combination of these two audiences means that Extension Online News writers are essentially presenting material for everyone online, they must consider all of the following:

• each story must meet the needs of experts in the field while also remaining functional for a more general audience
• readers’ operating systems, web browsers and technical limitations may vary widely
• information must be updated regularly to generate enough interest for such a diverse group to keep coming back

Writers for Online News should strive to make each reader leave the blog feeling like something was written specifically for that individual.

NAVIGATION

Semiotics and Design

Most web pages use semiotics, or symbols that allow users to interact with online information in a predictable manner. For example, a trash can icon represents the desktop recycle bin and a house icon represents the link to the home page.

Because the Extension Online News audience is so diverse, symbols used throughout the site must be universal so all users experience the site seamlessly, without being impeded by underlying technology. The “read more” links, for example, must always take readers to the complete story they started reading on the home page. The Search box must accurately return results based on the keywords entered, and other links on the page must go where the reader intuitively expects them to go.

Content

The text of the blog should be clear to both experts in the field and those learning about Extension for the first time. The writing should be detailed and precise, and each news item should adhere to a predetermined style guide for uniformity throughout the posts. Short paragraphs written in an inverted pyramid with the most important information at the top should guide the reader through the story. Each section should use an active voice with good pacing and flow. Each news item, as well as the entire content of the blog, should be organized and presented with appropriate headers that describe the information that follows. Readers must be able to discern from a quick reading of the headlines what information the article does not include, as well as what it does include. Additional pieces of content to strengthen Online News include:

• Subheads to divide the reading, offer visual relief from a text-heavy page, and help guide readers quickly to sections that interest them most
• Links to additional resources that appear in logical places on the page and flow with, rather than against, the text
• Bulleted or numbered lists to make each point clear in the reader’s mind
• Graphic elements or photographs that add something difficult to glean from the text only
• Frequent updates and new blog entries
• Clear contact information for reader story ideas or questions

Online News content must become more interactive in order to generate and maintain readers. Not just a repackaged print publication, this blog should have the ability to provide readers with any form of information they need: charts and graphs, podcasts of past events, live chats or slide shows. Online News should become a fully interactive, often consulted resource for people across the state and beyond.

• Discuss how your writing has changed since the beginning of the course
• What you have learned in the course that you think will prove most useful going forward
• What unanswered questions remain for you
• How this course could be enhanced, improved, changed (be brutal!)
• What the instructor could perhaps do to better facilitate maximum learning

Writing in Retrospect

I’ve always been around writers. My father is an English professor. My husband is a sports writer. Most of my friends have been journalists at one time or another. Our house is overflowing with books. So you’d think that I’d also be a prolific writer. Unfortunately, I dropped the writing halfway through college to concentrate on photography. By the time I was ready to pick up a pen (okay, a laptop) again, I had developed a rather debilitating inferiority complex about my writing. This class was my attempt to relocate lost skills and to remember what it was like when reporters actually came to me, a photographer, for a quick proofread before sending their work to an editor.

The biggest gift JOMC 711 has given me is the return of my writing voice– the realization that I do have something to say and that I can present it in a way that might actually be interesting to some readers.

Tangible signs my writing has changed over the course of the semester:

• I’ve gained a much better appreciation for good writing. I used to read a news story and notice thorough content or good quotes. Now, I also recognize the craftsmanship behind a well-organized, thoughtfully written story that holds my interest to the end.
• I view myself as a competent writer. In one of our discussion boards, I wrote about “other writers.” In retrospect, this small reference signifies a major breakthrough for me, as I never would have lumped myself into a group of writers before this class.
• I’m no longer afraid or embarrassed to let others see my work in progress. In fact, I understand the full potential for improvement in my writing with multiple edits and editors throughout the process.
• I just received an invitation to join a women writers’ discussion group that meets in Wilmington and includes journalists and published authors.
• My supervisor wrote in my year-end performance appraisal and work plan for next year that my writing and editing skills are currently underused by our department.

The Things I Learned

I’ve learned that good writing is all about knowing your audience and giving them the ability to navigate easily through your information. All of our other lessons seemed to flow from these two points. Good headlines make your content clear; subheads keep the content accessible and orderly. Bulleted or numbered lists are not just pretty graphic elements on a page. They serve the important purpose of making each of the writer’s points distinct and help the reader find his or her way through the page much faster. Good linking enhances content by providing information that adds to the writer’s points, rather than distracting from them. Writing in an inverted pyramid places the most important information at the top and allows the reader to decide whether to continue. In short, every little thing you place on a web page should be designed to help the reader.

Things I really liked about the class:

• Most of the homework assignments were directly applicable to my job. The feedback from both instructor and classmates gave me the confidence to present some of my classwork as written suggestions for changes to our departmental and College website design.
• I really enjoyed the diversity of the class, both in our distinct personalities and in the different perspectives coming from various types of employment and geographic location. I appreciated that we became so much more of a community in this class format than we would have in a seated class.

What’s Next?

Completion of this class means completion of the Certificate program for me. Now that I have recent experience in both photography and writing, I want to explore web design in a little more detail so that I one day have the skills to create entire pages or websites that are visually stimulating, well-written, timely and easy to navigate.

Lingering Questions

Will the printed newspaper survive? Though I often consult the web for news, I don’t want to be forced to spend my Sunday mornings tucked away in our cramped little computer room. Nor do I want to read the Sunday paper on my cell phone. Just call me old-fashioned.

Will everyone have a blog, and can we ignore the bad ones? While I think our class has taken a giant step forward into good blogging, the rest of the world has some catching up to do. As more and more individuals begin to blog, whether as themselves or in their Second Life, I think it will become more and more difficult to discern which writers are legitimate.

Enhancing the class:

The Readings: While I think I gleaned something from each of our readings, even from our man Jay David Bolter, the readings I enjoyed most were the ones that revealed what is going on presently in communications and technology. Perhaps if some of the more dated readings were paired for a compare-and-contrast type of discussion with a current take on the same subject, more of the academic and historical stuff would stick.

The Homework: I would suggest a second opportunity during the semester to critique and be critiqued by another student. I found BC’s comments on each of our writing pieces to be thorough, thoughtful, constructive and broad enough to be applied not just to the assignment at hand but across my writing in general. I also found great value in having another student critique my work. And the experience of writing a critique of another students’ writing proved invaluable to me. It taught me how to tactfully present alternatives to another person’s work without judging or offending. These are skills I use every day at work to produce finished printed and web products that are polished and professional. Sometimes the most difficult part of a work project is not the actual writing, photography or graphic design, but the negotiations between the parties to best represent each person’s contribution to the final project, while remembering what’s most important in the end: the client and their audience.

The Study Book: As Gerry pointed out, there were some discrepancies between the Study Book and the online syllabus and required readings. It is certainly understandable that the printed version goes to press long before the online guide might be finalized. A note in the announcements at the beginning of the semester indicating students should go by the online information when there’s a question might help.

I periodically came across little typos and omissions in the Study Book. (I wish now that I’d highlighted them for future reference.) Again, the Study Book contains a huge amount of information that is an evolving guide for the class. In any other class, I wouldn’t even mention it. But since this is a class about writing, the course book should be a stellar example of good writing for us all.

The Instructor and Maximum Learning

In future classes, BC, please continue to do that thing you do. It is clear from the discussion board posts that you:

• Are intimately familiar with the course material
• Keep up with new trends and technology
• Read each and every post
• Remember what we write in those posts

It is also obvious that you take the time to consider each homework assignment carefully and to provide detailed information on how to improve it. Your comments often left me with that lightning bolt sort of “why didn’t I think of that on my own?” moment. All of your comments were relevant, helpful, and much appreciated.

In the End

I avoided this class as long as I could because I was nervous about how it would go for me, a visual learner, thinker and worker. But it’s been the most enjoyable of my four classes, both in the intensity of discussion on the boards and in the relevancy of our homework assignments to my job and future as a now photographer/writer. I certainly enjoyed “meeting” everyone and will miss my daily neurotic checks on the boards to make sure nobody posted anything way down at the bottom that I might be missing! Thanks to all.

Note: This is the final revision to my Original Writing Piece. After using feedback from BC and Christy for my initial revision, I also received a (very nice) critique from Will Hooker himself. Easily the most terrifying moment of the entire semester was the day I received Hooker’s emailed response to my work. Fortunately, he liked it and offered the following comments:

“There is only one change that I would make; where you say I was working on the Duke University grounds crew when I got an opportunity to teach in the College of Design, I had actually moved from the Duke job back into a landscape architecture office. My boss there was assigned the job of teaching a 2-3 week project in the landscape architecture department and I took over for him. I guess another thing is that your story implies that I just started using bamboo with “The Trail of Zephyros”; actually I started using bamboo for sculpture in 1992. Not a big deal really. I do love the photos you’ve chosen; well done. Again, Thanks!!!!

I’ve corrected these inconsistencies below, and I owe Will Hooker many thanks for giving me so much of his time and for patiently answering all of my questions.

Landscape Artist Offers New Interpretation of Monet Paintings

Will Hooker is no stranger to the creative process. He’s a landscape designer and a professor. He’s been a ballet dancer and a craftshop worker. And most recently, he’s used his creative skills to finish an outdoor art installation designed to herald the arrival of the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Visit Will Hooker’s “Reflections From the Ru”
just behind the North Carolina Museum of Art.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

The “Monet in Normandy” exhibit is new to the Museum, but Will Hooker and his art are not. Hooker, a North Carolina State University horticulture professor, has had an association with the Museum since 2004, when he created his first bamboo piece for the Museum Park, the outdoor grounds of the Museum, called “The Trail of Zephyros.”

Hooker arranges poles in his 2004
sculpture to have “sensuously curving
horizontal and vertical flow.”
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

The Installation: “Reflections From the Ru”

Hooker’s new installation, titled “Reflections From the Ru,” features a series of bamboo shoots rising from the water’s edge with hand-blown, highly reflective gazing balls placed throughout the pond. Visitors experience a different view with each step around the pond as their point of reference changes. The piece is so named because Hooker drew inspiration from Claude Monet’s lily pond, fed by the river Ru in Giverny, Normandy. He explains, “Basically this piece is about color on a pond to reflect Monet’s Water Lilies paintings and to bring attention to his work to coincide with the opening of the exhibit…honoring the impressionist master’s passion for color, the multi-colored gazing balls are scattered amongst the ‘reeds,’ with the whole creating an ever changing play of light, color, reflections and unanticipated surprises.”

Students waded out as far as they could with the
gazing balls, leaving deep water placement for the boats.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

Hooker and his Residential Landscaping students spent the weeks leading up to the Monet exhibit’s arrival wading in and out of the Museum Park pond, placing the gazing balls and bamboo shoots in exact locations. Hooker originally wanted to arrange the balls in clusters resembling Monet’s lily pads, but keeping enough separation between the fragile gazing balls to prevent breakage from a little wind or a flock of birds landing prevented that arrangement.

Hooker experimented with plastic rings around the exterior of the
gazing balls before deciding to hook a line to a brick on the bottom
of the pond to secure the balls (right) in a predetermined location (left.)
(Photos by Becky Kirkland.)

The Inspiration

When Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator, called to ask Hooker if he’d be interested in creating a companion piece for the Monet exhibit, Hooker immediately thought of using reflective balls. “It just popped into my mind to use gazing balls,” he said, because “they are perfect in form, a spherical globe, yet, being made of glass, incredibly fragile…The contrast and fragility, which is itself a comment on life, make these the perfect item to contemplate our lives.”

Hooker used 150 hand-blown gazing balls made in Ohio
to complete his pond installation.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

But Hooker felt something about this vision was incomplete. Around the same time, he attended his daughter’s open house at the School of the Arts in Durham. One of the students showed a painting with vertical cattails in the foreground. Then he knew the missing piece in his own work was that vertical element, which he’d fill with bamboo. The bamboo, Hooker says, is “meant to pay homage to the local ecology, implying reeds around the edge of the pond.”

Trading a Car for a Coke

As a kid, Will Hooker loved art and nature. “If I was inside, I was drawing. If I was outside, I was running around in the woods,” he said. In college, Hooker found a way to marry the two in landscape architecture. He landed a job in Durham, NC and worked there until he “got the itch to travel.”

So Hooker sold or gave away everything he owned in the 1970’s. His car was the last item. He intended to drive it to the town dump to leave it there, but he was out of gas and stopped to purchase a quarter’s-worth– just enough to get him there. The attendant at the station offered to purchase the car, but Hooker wanted the story of giving it away. They settled for an exchange of car for coca-cola, and Hooker proceeded to hitchhike to California.

After stints in San Francisco, Germany and New York, Hooker returned to Durham from the northeast by bike. He worked as part of the Duke University grounds crew before returning to employment at a landscape architecture office. When a supervisor there passed down an opportunity to lecture in the College of Design at N.C. State, Hooker found the path to new professional satisfaction. One thing led to another, and he found himself with a tenure-track position in Horticultural Science, teaching in the landscape design program.

Discovering a Calling

Teaching, he learned, is his true calling. But he needed more to fulfill his creative yearnings. He did a little consulting and design on the side. He absorbed himself in dancing ballet. Then he teamed up with a Forestry department conference. One component of the conference was a volunteer day. Conference organizers discussed a design contest, but Hooker suggested they actually build something. He put together the design for a winding sculpture made of bamboo, a material he had used previously with inspiration from the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an environmental artist whose creations use all natural materials. Hooker and his students harvested more than 200 bamboo chutes for the project. The installation began with help from the conference volunteers and finished up with Hooker, his students, and anyone else who could assist. The result became the “Trail of Zephyros.” Completing the project, said Hooker, “gave me a thrill because it was a creative process and furthermore [included] working with students.” Hooker’s original vision was to carve out holes in the bamboo to make them work like flutes. Time constraints prevented that, but Hooker is pleased to note that over time, the bamboo aged in the sun to achieve his original vision by splitting and beginning to whistle in the wind.

Hooker adjusts one of the 161 poles
in his 2004 “Trail of Zephyros” piece.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

Why Materials that Age and Disappear?

Hooker defines his creative style with a story about a class field trip. While his students enjoyed a little free time on the beach, Hooker entertained himself by creating a seagull sandscape. He was finishing the piece when a passerby asked why he chose to make art in the sand instead of using something that would last that he could sell. This was a defining moment for Hooker. He thought for a long time afterward, “Why did I build it out of sand?” He eventually concluded that the creative process is much more valuable to him than the potential product: “My reward is the juice of the creative process.” He jokes, “A lot of my work would be better if it disappeared quicker.” Regardless of the materials he uses (often natural elements such as sand, snow or bamboo) Hooker intends his art to be:

• Ephemeral
• Interactive
• Something that makes the viewer smile

He certainly meets these requirements in his current installment at the Museum Park, “Reflections From the Ru.” Viewers must walk around to view the piece completely, and the scene changes every time either the viewer or the sun moves. As Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator notes about the piece, “at the end of the day, when the sun is about to set, the color mixed with the reflection of the gazing balls is just magic.”

The Finished Product

“This piece did something for me,” Hooker says of his second project for the Museum Park. It has reassured him that when he’s ready to retire from teaching, he can “go around and do sculptures and be happy.” And from a teaching perspective, he’s pleased that his students have taken away from the project a better understanding of design. “It’s a subtle thing, but how do you stick poles in the mud in an artistic way? They could see [in the finished piece] that it made a difference.”

Joseph Covington is also delighted with the finished product. It combines art and the environment together, a goal of the Museum Park, and “it has the same kind of unexpected reflection of color in the water that Monet created in his water lily paintings.”

And like the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit’s stay in Raleigh, Hooker’s work is ephemeral. His pond installation will last until the Monet exhibit leaves the Museum after January 14, 2007. Then Hooker’s art, too, will vanish.

As a result of our current outdated page design, we receive many questions about where to find information on our site. While the redesign seeks to resolve many of these navigational issues, it remains important to post a FAQ page to assist our clients with answers to often-asked questions.

Department of Communication Services Frequently Asked Questions

What services do you offer?
The Department of Communication Services, housed in the Butler Communication Services Building at 3210 Faucette Drive on the campus of North Carolina State University, offers the following services to University faculty and staff:

• Editing
• Graphic Design
• Multimedia and Photography
• Printing
• Tobacco Literature
• Video
• Writing

Our Customer Service team provides information about our services, distribution of our publications, handling of our photographic archives and assistance with billing inquiries.

Do I have to pay for your services, and how much?
We do charge a modest fee for our services to cover the cost of materials. College of Agriculture and Life Sciences employees pay only for services rendered; clients in other colleges and units pay a small hourly fee in addition to the cost of materials. Our Customer Service department is available weekdays 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. to answer billing questions at 919-513-3045 and can direct specific inquiries to the service area best qualified to provide exact estimates for jobs requested.

Can anyone request services from your department?
Any faculty or staff employee at N.C. State University can request our services. We do not typically accept work from students except in special cases when the student or student group is sponsored by a University department. Professionals and private individuals outside the University can order prints from our existing photo archives.

How do I know who to contact for the service I need?
Our customer service representatives are prepared to direct you to whichever team can best assist you with your project (919-513-3045.) If you have a fairly clear idea about what type of service you’ll need, you can search our services page to locate team members, their specialties and contact information. For a complete listing of our staff, please consult our alphabetical staff directory.

How can I see samples of work your department has done in the past?
We offer two areas online where you can view our work:

• Our Photo Gallery contains thousands of images covering the history of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, grouped by subject for easy navigating
• Our Showcase page highlights some of the websites our department has designed

Any of our team leaders are available by appointment for individual consultation on any project. For many client jobs, we involve more than one team in our department. (For a printed piece, for example, one of our designers might work with photographs created in-house. The project could then go directly to our printing department.)

How do I find photos I can use on my N.C. State web page?
Any of our Photo Gallery images are available to N.C. State employees free of charge for University-related web use (requires a Unity password.) Any of the more than one million images in our photo archives not appearing in the gallery can also be used by University employees. Please consult our customer service representatives for assistance with our image database and archives.

Do I have access to the high-resolution print versions of photos in your gallery?
Yes. We do charge a small fee to print a high-resolution image or to save it to CD. Please contact our Customer Service department for this type of request.

How do I find a specific story or a specific issue of Perspectives magazine?
Our department does produce Perspectives, the magazine of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. From the Perspectives home page, you can search by year and issue. (The cover photo defaults to the current issue of the magazine.) We’ve recently added a search function to allow quicker searches based on subject matter. Look for the search link on the left-hand side of the page, just above the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences link.

Who do I contact with story ideas for the magazine?
Terri Leith (terri_leith@ncsu.edu) is our Perspectives editor. She welcomes reader input and story ideas.

How do I order copies of your publications?
Our distribution team, operating within our customer service department, can help you place orders for whatever volume of any of our publications you might require.

North Carolina Solar House Welcomes Visitors After 25 Years of Service, Begins Fundraising Campaign

Contact: Becky Kirkland
Dept. of Communication Services
North Carolina State University
rebecca_kirkland@ncsu.edu
919-513-3110

November 12, 2006

For Immediate Release:

The Solar House at North Carolina State University celebrated its 25th anniversary today in ceremonies that touted past successes and looked forward to growth in the coming 25 years.

The Solar House, operated by the College of Engineering as a part of the North Carolina Solar Center, offers a publicly accessible demonstration building for residential and business energy efficiency technology, as well as a working research center and political advisory group. It is open six days a week with specialists available to answer visitor questions and provide individual training. The Solar House is one of the most visited buildings of its kind, providing tours for 250,000 international visitors since its opening in 1981. Students and faculty are able to evaluate the efficiency of solar technology in place at the Solar House and offer those findings to visitors seeking renewable energy options. The Solar House heating bill for an entire year averages only $70.00.

The N.C. Solar Center works to lower energy costs for citizens and businesses, to reduce the environmental impact of energy consumption, and to reduce dependence on foreign oil. The Center offers information about the following types of renewable energy sources:

• Stephen S. Kalland, Director of the N.C. Solar Center
• Dr. Richard D. Gould, Interim Department Head for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Dr. Louis A. Martin-Vega, Dean of the NCSU Department of Engineering
• Brad Miller, U.S. House of Representatives
• Dr. Herbert Eckerlin, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Albert S. Boyers, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Ray F. Debruhl, Professor of Civil Engineering
• Janet Cowell, North Carolina State Senate
• Larry Shirley, Division Director, NC State Energy Office, Department of Administration
• Secretary Britt Cobb, N.C. Department of Administration

Will Hooker is no stranger to the creative process. He’s a landscape designer and a professor. He’s been a ballet dancer and a craftshop worker. And most recently, he’s used his creative skills to finish an outdoor art installation designed to herald the arrival of the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Visit Will Hooker’s “Reflections From the Ru”
just behind the North Carolina Museum of Art.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

The “Monet in Normandy” exhibit is new to the Museum, but Will Hooker and his art are not. Hooker, a North Carolina State University horticulture professor, has had an association with the Museum since 2004, when he created his first bamboo piece for the Museum Park, the outdoor grounds of the Museum, called “The Trail of Zephyros.”

Hooker arranges poles in his 2004
sculpture to have “sensuously curving
horizontal and vertical flow.”
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

The Installation: “Reflections From the Ru”

Hooker’s new installation, titled “Reflections From the Ru,” features a series of bamboo shoots rising from the water’s edge with hand-blown, highly reflective gazing balls placed throughout the pond. Visitors experience a different view with each step around the pond as their point of reference changes. The piece is so named because Hooker drew inspiration from Claude Monet’s lily pond, fed by the river Ru in Giverny, Normandy. He explains, “Basically this piece is about color on a pond to reflect Monet’s Water Lilies paintings and to bring attention to his work to coincide with the opening of the exhibit…honoring the impressionist master’s passion for color, the multi-colored gazing balls are scattered amongst the ‘reeds,’ with the whole creating an ever changing play of light, color, reflections and unanticipated surprises.”

Students waded out as far as they could with the
gazing balls, leaving deep water placement for the boats.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

Hooker and his Residential Landscaping students spent the weeks leading up to the Monet exhibit’s arrival wading in and out of the Museum Park pond, placing the gazing balls and bamboo shoots in exact locations. Hooker originally wanted to arrange the balls in clusters resembling Monet’s lily pads, but keeping enough separation between the fragile gazing balls to prevent breakage from a little wind or a flock of birds landing prevented that arrangement.

Hooker experimented with plastic rings around the exterior of the
gazing balls before deciding to hook a line to a brick on the bottom
of the pond to secure the balls (right) in a predetermined location (left.)
(Photos by Becky Kirkland.)

The Inspiration

When Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator, called to ask Hooker if he’d be interested in creating a companion piece for the Monet exhibit, Hooker immediately thought of using reflective balls. “It just popped into my mind to use gazing balls,” he said, because “they are perfect in form, a spherical globe, yet, being made of glass, incredibly fragile…The contrast and fragility, which is itself a comment on life, make these the perfect item to contemplate our lives.”

Hooker used 150 hand-blown gazing balls made in Ohio
to complete his pond installation.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

But Hooker felt something about this vision was incomplete. Around the same time, he attended his daughter’s open house at the School of the Arts in Durham. One of the students showed a painting with vertical cattails in the foreground. Then he knew the missing piece in his own work was that vertical element, which he’d fill with bamboo. The bamboo, Hooker says, is “meant to pay homage to the local ecology, implying reeds around the edge of the pond.”

Trading a Car for a Coke

As a kid, Will Hooker loved art and nature. “If I was inside, I was drawing. If I was outside, I was running around in the woods,” he said. In college, Hooker found a way to marry the two in landscape architecture. He landed a job in Durham, NC and worked there until he “got the itch to travel.”

So Hooker sold or gave away everything he owned in the 1970′s. His car was the last item. He intended to drive it to the town dump to leave it there, but he was out of gas and stopped to purchase a quarter’s-worth– just enough to get him there. The attendant at the station offered to purchase the car, but Hooker wanted the story of giving it away. They settled for an exchange of car for a coca-cola, and Hooker proceeded to hitchhike to California.

After stints in San Francisco, Germany and New York, Hooker returned to Durham from the northeast by bike. He was working as part of the Duke University grounds crew when a supervisor passed down an opportunity for him to lecture in the College of Design at N.C. State. One thing led to another, and Hooker found himself with a tenure-track position in Horticultural Science, teaching the landscape design program.

Discovering a Calling

Teaching, he learned, is his true calling. But he needed more to fulfill his creative yearnings. He did a little consulting and design on the side. He absorbed himself in dancing ballet. Then he teamed up with a Forestry department conference. One component of the conference was a volunteer day. Conference organizers discussed a design contest, but Hooker suggested they actually build something. He put together the design for a winding sculpture made of bamboo, a material he was beginning to use with inspiration from the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an environmental artist whose creations use all natural materials. Hooker and his students harvested more than 200 bamboo chutes for the project. The installation began with help from the conference volunteers and finished up with Hooker, his students, and anyone else who could assist. The result became the “Trail of Zephyros.” Completing the project, said Hooker, “gave me a thrill because it was a creative process and furthermore [included] working with students.” Hooker’s original vision was to carve out holes in the bamboo to make them work like flutes. Time constraints prevented that, but Hooker is pleased to note that over time, the bamboo aged in the sun to achieve his original vision by splitting and beginning to whistle in the wind.

Hooker adjusts one of the 161 poles
in his 2004 “Trail of Zephyros” piece.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)

Why Materials that Age and Disappear?

Hooker defines his creative style with a story about a class field trip. While his students enjoyed a little free time on the beach, Hooker entertained himself by creating a seagull sandscape. He was finishing the piece when a passerby asked why he chose to make art in the sand instead of using something that would last that he could sell. This was a defining moment for Hooker. He thought for a long time afterward, “Why did I build it out of sand?” He eventually concluded that the creative process is much more valuable to him than the potential product: “My reward is the juice of the creative process.” He jokes, “A lot of my work would be better if it disappeared quicker.” Regardless of the materials he uses (often natural elements such as sand, snow or bamboo) Hooker intends his art to be:

• Ephemeral
• Interactive
• Something that makes the viewer smile

He certainly meets these requirements in his current installment at the Museum Park, “Reflections From the Ru.” Viewers must walk around to view the piece completely, and the scene changes every time either the viewer or the sun moves. As Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator notes about the piece, “at the end of the day, when the sun is about to set, the color mixed with the reflection of the gazing balls is just magic.”

The Finished Product

“This piece did something for me,” Hooker says of his second project for the Museum Park. It has reassured him that when he’s ready to retire from teaching, he can “go around and do sculptures and be happy.” And from a teaching perspective, he’s pleased that his students have taken away from the project a better understanding of design. “It’s a subtle thing, but how do you stick poles in the mud in an artistic way? They could see [in the finished piece] that it made a difference.”

Joseph Covington is also delighted with the finished product. It combines art and the environment together, a goal of the Museum Park, and “it has the same kind of unexpected reflection of color in the water that Monet created in his water lily paintings.”

And like the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit’s stay in Raleigh, Hooker’s work is ephemeral. His pond installation will last until the Monet exhibit leaves the Museum January 15, 2007. Then Hooker’s art, too, will vanish.

I’m attending a North Carolina State University (NCSU) library workshop on instructional design, or at least I think I am. I arrive ten minutes before the start time to an empty room. None of the students sprawled across the new leather furniture in the adjacent study area can tell me if I’m at the correct location.

At three minutes before the advertised start time, two people arrive, place their belongings on a seat and head for the restroom. I’m still wondering if I read the date or location incorrectly. On the hour exactly, the two presenters arrive. We start the session by introducing ourselves and our interest in the presentation. I’m the only one in the room who’s not a Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications employee. Now I know they are in the correct location but I’m wondering if I should go back to my class notes and select a less intimidating group to cover for my blog assignment.

Kim Duckett, a digital technologies and learning librarian, saves the day for me in her introduction to the session’s topic: “A Collaborative Model for Successful Instructional Design: Sharing Resources and Knowledge to Support Course Development.” The first slide in her powerpoint presentation asks us to evaluate which groups apply to us: instructor, librarian, instructional designer, student. Since I am most decidedly a student and also fit into the instructor category as an occasional informal photography teacher, I decide to stay.

Dede Nelson, an instructional designer for adult and higher education at NCSU, leads us first in a discussion about changes in teaching and learning. These include:

• dramatic growth in the body of knowledge
• increasing use and complexity of technology
• globalization
• pressure to produce measurable outcomes
• expanded understanding of how people learn
• diversity
• demand for online classes

Traditional Course Development

Duckett and Nelson then illustrate the traditional model for course development. It is a straight line that goes directly from the instructor, or content expert, to the student. This model contains no collaborative partners. It is merely one-way transmission of information from instructor to student.

The next model is a variation of the first. It includes minimal interaction between a librarian and the instructor, usually in the form of the librarian helping students access library resources. Librarians call this type of interaction with students “one-shot instructional sessions,” usually a 50-minute class period, when they go over the best ways to conduct research at the library. Librarians prefer to conduct these sessions after research papers have been assigned in the classroom, making their presentations more relevant to the students, but instructors often schedule these sessions in the beginning of the semester as an introductory lesson, before students have real incentive to listen and take notes.

The presenters argue that this model no longer works, particularly in distance education courses. Instructors are moving away from merely repackaging traditional classroom materials and are redesigning their online courses from the beginning.

The New Model

The new course development model looks more like planets in orbit than the straight line of the traditional model. The student sits inside a circle that includes the instructor, the librarian and the instructional designer– all with two-way communication between each other and the student. This model is meant to be a cyclical process, with all parties revolving around and interacting with the student.

The instructor still provides the content expertise and presentation to the students. The instructional designer ensures the students meet targeted learning objectives linked to specific learning activities and measurable outcomes. The librarian offers expertise in information literacy, research strategies, copyright and intellectual property issues. All rotate around the student in an effort to provide the most effective learning environment.

In this model, there is much student involvement: the students teach the librarians, instructors and instructional designers as much as the other way around. The new model fosters good channels of communication, so that the librarian can take student complaints and problems about the course or its assignments back to the course instructor for future course improvement. The librarian and instructional designer are involved over the course of the semester, rather than being brought in only once at the start.

Making It Work

The library offers a list of tools showing students how to maximize their time using library resources, but historically librarians haven’t known if those tools ever became a core part of any course. With implementation of the new model, the library connection is sustained throughout the course. Instructors receive a Library Services Checklist that helps them determine which library services could be beneficial to their students.

Duckett and Nelson stress that the key in creating the new instructional model is to get faculty members involved as part of a team where their role is providing content and working with the team on best presentation of that content.

As these relationships develop, the team will create reusable resources for the library including packaged resource pages that, once created, can be used by multiple instructors in multiple disciplines.

Three Pieces to the Puzzle

This new model for course development allows the instructor to remain as the content provider and expert. The additional members of the team include instructional designers with the following strengths:

• in-depth familiarity with courses and access to course sites
• expertise in higher education pedagogy
• ability to facilitate integration of library resources across courses
• close relationship with faculty and awareness of their instructional needs
• bird’s-eye view of courses and programs

Librarians bring the following perspective:

• in-depth familiarity with course-appropriate information resources
• expertise in information research strategies and instruction
• ability to facilitate distribution of library resources to distance education students through TripSaver
• close relationship with students and awareness of their information literacy instruction needs
• view of problems with research assignments and students’ cognitive gaps

The Future

Opportunities for cross-departmental partnerships need to be explored, nurtured and promoted. Additional study to ascertain effectiveness of these partnerships is also necessary.

Participants suggested several ways to bring pockets of expertise together as shared knowledge. One already in the works is the library blern (From the blern site: “A made-up word that combines the notions of “blogging” and “blending” and “learning.”)

One of the participants suggests the group create a FAQ page with a wiki format to have a “dumping ground” for web-based content questions and answers. Participants cite the need for a central place to report what’s going on in classes using the new instructional design model– a place to share how things are working and resources for creating new classes.

I’ve learned some things, as well. I now see how students can benefit from collaborative course design, involving the instructor, instructional designer and librarian throughout the course. I also see the potential benefits to course design from student input to each of the collaborators as their course progresses. I head back to my office with, at the very least, new knowledge about teaching resources available on campus. As an extra bonus, I get my name attached to the digital technologies users’ group, so that I’ll receive email updates in the future.

Additional Resources

Carmean, C. and Haefner, J. (2002). Mind over matter: Transforming course management systems into effective learning environments. EDUCAUSE Review, http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0261.pdf.

Oblinger, D. and Hawkins, B. (2006). The myth about online course development. EDUCAUSE Review, http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0617.asp.

Rader, H. (1998). Faculty-librarian collaboration in building the curriculum for the millennium- the US experience. IFLA General Conference Proceedings. http://www.ifla.org/V/iflaj/ilj2504.pdf. Under “search collections,” perform a search for Rader.

Will Hooker is no stranger to the creative process. He’s a landscape designer and a professor. He’s been a ballet dancer and a craft shop worker. And most recently, he’s used his creative skills to finish an outdoor art installation designed to herald the arrival of the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The “Monet in Normandy” exhibit is new to the Museum. But Will Hooker and his art are not. Hooker, a North Carolina State University horticulture professor, has had an association with the Museum since 2004, when he created his first bamboo piece for the Museum Park, the outdoor grounds of the Museum, called “The Trail of Zephyros.”

The Installation: “Reflections From the Ru”

Hooker’s new installation, titled “Reflections From the Ru,” features a series of bamboo shoots rising from the water’s edge with hand-blown, highly reflective gazing balls placed throughout the pond. Visitors experience a different view with each step around the pond as their point of reference changes. The piece is so named because Hooker drew inspiration from Claude Monet’s lily pond, fed by the river Ru in Giverny, Normandy. He explains, “Basically this piece is about color on a pond to reflect Monet’s Water Lilies paintings and to bring attention to his work to coincide with the opening of the exhibit…honoring the impressionist master’s passion for color, the multi-colored gazing balls are scattered amongst the ‘reeds,’ with the whole creating an ever changing play of light, color, reflections and unanticipated surprises.”

Hooker and his Residential Landscaping students spent the weeks leading up to the Monet exhibit’s arrival wading in and out of the Museum Park pond, placing the gazing balls and bamboo shoots in exact locations. Hooker originally wanted to arrange the balls in clusters resembling Monet’s lily pads, but keeping enough separation between the fragile gazing balls to prevent breakage from a little wind or a flock of birds landing prevented that arrangement.

The Inspiration

When Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator, called to ask Hooker if he’d be interested in creating a companion piece for the Monet exhibit, Hooker immediately thought of using reflective balls. “It just popped into my mind to use gazing balls,” he said, because “they are perfect in form, a spherical globe, yet, being made of glass, incredibly fragile…The contrast and fragility, which is itself a comment on life, make these the perfect item to comtemplate our lives.”

But Hooker felt something about this vision was incomplete. Around the same time, he attended his daughter’s open house at the School of the Arts in Durham. One of the students showed a painting with vertical cattails in the foreground. Then he knew the missing piece in his own work was that vertical element, which he’d fill with bamboo. The bamboo, Hooker says, is “meant to pay homage to the local ecology, implying reeds around the edge of the pond.”

Always a Creative Soul

As a kid, Will Hooker loved art and nature. “If I was inside, I was drawing. If I was outside, I was running around in the woods,” he said. In college, Hooker found a way to marry the two in landscape architecture. He landed a job in Durham, NC and worked there until he “got the itch to travel.”

Trading a Car for a Coke

So Hooker sold or gave away everything he owned in the 1970′s. His car was the last item. He intended to drive it to the town dump to leave it there, but he was out of gas and stopped to purchase a quarter’s-worth– just enough to get him there. The attendant at the station offered to purchase the car, but Hooker wanted the story of giving it away. They settled for an exchange of car for a coca-cola, and Hooker proceeded to hitchhike to California.

After stints in San Francisco, Germany and New York, Hooker returned to Durham from the northeast by bike. He was working as part of the Duke University grounds crew when a supervisor passed down an opportunity for him to lecture in the College of Design at N.C. State. One thing led to another, and Hooker found himself with a tenure-track position in Horticultural Science, teaching the landscape design program.

Discovering a Calling

Teaching, he learned, is his true calling. But he needed more to fulfill his creative yearnings. He did a little consulting and design on the side. He absorbed himself in dancing ballet. Then he teamed up with a Forestry department conference. One component of the conference was a volunteer day. Conference organizers discussed a design contest, but Hooker suggested they actually build something. He put together the design for a winding sculpture made of bamboo, a material he was beginning to use with inspiration from the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an environmental artist whose creations use all natural materials. Hooker and his students harvested more than 200 bamboo chutes for the project. The installation began with help from the conference volunteers and finished up with Hooker, his students, and anyone else who could assist. The result became the “Trail of Zephyros.” Completing the project, said Hooker, “gave me a thrill because it was a creative process and furthermore [included] working with students.” Hooker’s original vision was to carve out holes in the bamboo to make them work like flutes. Time constraints prevented that, but Hooker is pleased to note that over time, the bamboo aged in the sun to achieve his original vision by splitting and beginning to whistle in the wind.

Why Materials that Age and Disappear?

Hooker defines his creative style with a story about a class field trip. While his students enjoyed a little free time on the beach, Hooker entertained himself by creating a seagull sandscape. He was finishing the piece when a passerby asked why he chose to make art in the sand instead of using something that would last that he could sell. This was a defining moment for Hooker. He thought for a long time afterward, “Why did I build it out of sand?” He eventually concluded that the creative process is much more valuable to him than the potential product: “My reward is the juice of the creative process.” He jokes, “A lot of my work would be better if it disappeared quicker.” Regardless of the materials he uses (often natural elements such as sand, snow or bamboo) Hooker intends his art to be:

• Ephemeral
• Interactive
• Something that makes the viewer smile

He certainly meets these requirements in his current installment at the Museum Park, “Reflections From the Ru.” Viewers must walk around to view the piece completely, and the scene changes every time either the viewer or the sun moves. As Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator notes about the piece, “at the end of the day, when the sun is about to set, the color mixed with the reflection of the gazing balls is just magic.”

The Finished Product

“This piece did something for me,” Hooker says of his second project for the Museum Park. It has reassured him that when he’s ready to retire from teaching, he can “go around and do sculptures and be happy.” And from a teaching perspective, he’s pleased that his students have taken away from the project a better understanding of design. “It’s a subtle thing, but how do you stick poles in the mud in an artistic way? They could see [in the finished piece] that it made a difference.”

Joseph Covington is also delighted with the finished product. It combines art and the environment together, a goal of the Museum Park, and “it has the same kind of unexpected reflection of color in the water that Monet created in his water lily paintings.”

And like the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit’s stay in Raleigh, Hooker’s work is ephemeral. His pond installation will last until the Monet exhibit leaves the Museum January 15, 2007. Then Hooker’s art, too, will vanish.

In the coming weeks, I will prepare a feature story for Extension Online News about Will Hooker, a North Carolina State University horticultural science professor who has created several art installations on the grounds of the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Hooker’s current work uses glass globes, bamboo and the Museum pond as a new type of canvas to present his personal take on Monet’s famous Water Lily paintings. Hooker’s piece welcomes and provides tribute to the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit that opened today, October 15, 2006, and will remain on display at the N.C. Museum of Art until January 14, 2007.

I will be writing one feature that will accomodate two audiences viewing the Extension Online News site:

• North Carolina Cooperative Extension employees who receive an update each time a story is added to the Online News site

• Anyone who happens upon the site by accident or through a search for the Monet exhibit

I hope to hold the interest of the larger audience with my subject matter: a horticulture professor with artistic vision. At the same time, I want to offer my target audience of Extension professionals a relevant story with a local news angle. My content will make connections between North Carolina State University, the current North Carolina Museum of Art exhibit and the installation created by Hooker that is available free to the public.

Most web pages are full of symbols that invite the user to roll over, click on, or interact with the screen in some predictable manner. Most of us recognize the desktop trashcan as a place to delete files, for instance. We know that if we click on the envelope, we’ll find email and that if we click on the little house, we’ll return to the home page. It is because we have a common experience with these symbolic conventions that we are able to communicate easily and effectively with each other online.

The Big Picture

On the broadest scale, we can interpret the basic design of a site and the navigation symbols it uses as a reflection of how much thought and consideration its designers have given to the audience. Good, navigable design says to users that professional developers have considered their needs from the start. Cluttered, confusing design might very well indicate lack of attention to the intended audience and, however unfairly, also convey amateurism, laziness or just plain sloppiness. All of these signals create a lack of user confidence in the site.

The Smallest Detail

Web users also interpret the little details. For instance, if a page contains “previous page” and “next page” icons at the end of the text, then a click on that icon should take users where they expect to go. Broken or excessive links and unfamiliar symbols frustrate users and encourage them to leave the page.

Putting It All Together

It is therefore crucial for web designers to carefully plan every symbol on a site to convey exact meaning to users and to provide accurate, speedy navigation in the process.

Thoughtful use of symbols will make the users’ experience a positive and transparent one that does not require them to think about technology to find what information they seek.