Service+Learning

SERVICE LEARNING
The Nature Based Art program has been helped by students in Dr. Dylan Wolfe's for several years now. This year students have broken up into multiple groups ranging from one person to three person teams. Some of the teams involved Social Media, Timeline, Blog, Maps, and Illustrations. The goals of each of these groups were to organize different types of information to help elevate the profile of the Nature Based Art at the South Carolina Botanical Gardens. This class is known as the "Format is Message" group, each undertaking different responsibilities to complete the overall goal of the Program.

 Social Media is becoming a bigger part of society everyday with the inventions of sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These two platforms are now widely regarded in spread news and information very quickly without much effort. Having profiles on each of these platforms provides exposure that the Nature Based Art program has never had before. Exposure is one thing that can help turn the program from relatively unknown to widely known in a very short time.

 Giving perspective on how long this program has been going on and how long it takes to complete these works of art is the objective of the timeline. With dates and times accompanying images of the art, people can have a new level of appreciation for all the work involved. It lets people know that these works were not created over night but actually took many hard hours of designing and implementing to achieve the desired outcome.

 The Blog is another form of social media that has began to become more prevalent in news and other media outlets. A student has been in charge of running the blog for the program, blogging up to three times a week. While the Facebook and Twitter pages have been designed for social media, the blog can give more in-depth details about the on-going improvements of the program. As a more formal way to reach the audience, the blogger writes and publishes their findings at the same time it is written.

 Something that has not been kept up with is the mapping of the sculptures and their locations around the garden. It has been discovered that some of the sculptures were either not on the old maps or in the complete wrong place. The student in charge of the maps part charted and plotted where each sculpture was and uploaded it to Google Maps. Currently on the website, there is a Google Maps application showing viewers an exact location and directions to each sculpture.

 Many pictures have been taken over the years at the Botanical Gardens but there have not been many drawings of the sculptures that occupy the garden. One student was put in charge of drawing pictures from photography or from real life. These illustrations add a personal touch to some of the previous of the works that was absent before. New illustrations are always good because they can show updated version or evolution of the pieces of art that are part of the Program. These drawings will also be put into the upcoming book about the Nature Based Art Program.

LINKS and DOCUMENTS
[|Service Learning]