Green Hectares - Community Service Learning Placement

Kovacs, S. (2009). Communicate! [Photograph]. Retrieved 

from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rekasara/5535507597/

My placement with Green Hectares was a great learning experience, possibly more than I originally thought. Community Service Learning (CSL) aims to integrate learning done in classrooms with experiences in the community. My experience with CSL demonstrated this very well. Many aspects of communication I learned about in ALES 204 I integrated into my project. My placement did challenge me in many ways such as learning to use online communication tools, learning to sift through the multitudes of information on the web to find relevant and useful resources and improving my verbal communication skills. Thankfully, many of the challenges I faced in my placement were made easier by different lectures I had in ALES 204. Very early in the semester our class taught us how to use social media sites professionally as well as to search for important, relevant and reliable material. We were taught to be critically literate! This came into great use during my placement.

My coordinator, partner and I used Basecamp to communicate and bring the project together. Basecamp is an online tool used by companies to manage projects and it allows different people to collaborate on projects in progress. Although we did not look at Basecamp in our class, we did talk about the many benefits of coordinating online and how companies have been pushing for more and more online content. Basecamp is just one more way in which the online department of companies is growing. Through Basecamp we were able to work on our CSL project on our own time, in our own spaces and everyone was able to watch the project progress every step of the way. I think this way of doing the project was very valuable since university students often have packed schedules which can make it hard to do projects in groups and in person. Green Hectares also takes advantage of Facebook, Twitter, and their own website. Their website offers a great deal of information about the organization, it’s purpose and how to get involved. Their Facebook page is mostly used to share different videos, blogs and articles about agriculture, agricultural business, communication, presenting ideas and extra tidbits of information about themselves. Finally, their Twitter account offers many different links to websites designed to educate people on how to effectively communicate and pitch their ideas. This aspect was the core of our project.

Sparklefish (2006). Group work [Photograph]. 

       Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/

       38795936@N00/308014588/

Our project focused on traditional styles of communication presented through modern communication forms. We developed a tip sheet for entrepreneurs consisting of 5 points centered on in-person communication (confident, effective public speaking and presentation tools) and all points were supplemented with online resources. We searched for online resources very carefully, selecting only those that were relevant to our points and those that came from reliable resources. In our ALES 204 class we learned how to sift through information on the internet, be critical of what we find and to always dig deeper into resources we think we’ll use. I used these skills when searching for online resources to supplement my points. These points are meant to help agricultural entrepreneurs develop and present their ideas to experts but the points are also broad enough to help all aspiring entrepreneurs. I won’t give too much away here, you’ll have to watch our Pecha Kucha presentation on April 13^th in our ALES 204 class!

CSL is a very valuable aspect of the ALES 204 class and I found the project really allowed me to apply my learning to a real life experience. Had I not done the CSL portion of the class I know I would still be wondering exactly how I’d used my ALES 204 knowledge. 

In response to my last post about the Edmonton Humane Society I'd like to direct you to Lauren's blog which has a great post about Dogs with Wings (a group I've mentioned before) and how they've helped our community, just like the EHS.