Category: Walter Blair

“SolarPonics” at Charleston’s first STEM Festival

The Office of Sustainability had the great opportunity to join Charleston’s first STEM festival at Liberty Square on February 8th. CofC’s tent hosted by the Lowcountry Hall of Science and Math was packed with a full schedule of groups that rotated through to showcase the awesome STEM-related work being done at the College.

Spring 2014 Interns Virginia Whorley and Drew Gardner represented the innovative work of our Office by demonstrating our new solar-powered aquaponics system.

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Photograph by Drew Gardner

This system is pretty cool – We took a Back to the Roots aquaponics kit, planted our own “crops” from Sea Island Savory Herbs in Johns Island, adopted a betta fish from our local Age of Aquariums in West Ashley, and installed a solar power system from West Marine in West Ashly to power the water circulation pump. With this system, we were able to demonstrate a practical model for some very complex and versatile concepts. We were able to tell people about alternative energy generation and storage, unconventional agricultural technology suited to urban environments like our own, food systems, and complex biological ecosystems.

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Photograph by Drew Gardner

This was a perfect venue for our Office, because we were able to talk to people of all different ages, from elementary school children to adults, and everyone found some part of it that interested them. It’s hard not to hope that some of the little ones will grow up to engineer systems that rethink the way we do things for a more sustainable future.

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Photograph by Drew Gardner

Hopefully we’ll get more opportunities to combine education, STEM, outreach, and sustainability. Stay tuned!

From Guest Blogger and Office Web Content Designer Walter Blair

Information Part II

I wrote last summer about my interest in information and some of the ways I was exploring the information problems that organizations such as our own face. I saw two big areas where information is increasingly difficult to handle – managing information flow within an office as well as effectively communicating information to the public.

It’s interesting for me to revisit my thoughts from when I was only a few months into my work with the Office of Sustainability. I was just becoming familiar with the goings on of my coworkers and the College as a whole as well as getting a feel for how I could marry my talents with the Office’s needs. Having now been in the Office through one full semester’s cohort of interns, I’m still very much interested in the information-related projects that I was pursuing last summer. The Mendeley research library, for example (geeky but aaawesome!) seems to me more important than ever to help sustain all of the amazing knowledge and experience gained from our interns as well as sustainability offices at neighboring institutions. While we’re on the subject of my geekdom, it’s worth mentioning that when our new multimedia intern Drew suggested that the Office could benefit from a logical filesystem that he could create for us, I almost wept with joy (Drew, you are the man). But projects aside, what I’d like to share at the moment is how my perspective on information has developed since the summer.

In some sense I feel like I’ve been catching up for the last few months. I was very interested in learning how to present information online in a way that was convenient, intuitive, and maybe even slightly attractive. I’ve been working hard to pick up skills in web design in order to better communicate information to the public. Check! Aside from dabbling in some pretty cool AWS technology, I feel like I have recently caught up to maybe 2004-2005 in terms of a fluency with online resources. A feat of which I am nonetheless very proud!

Now I’m facing the new information problem – communicating with the public is not really about having pretty websites anymore. They certainly don’t hurt, but what I realize now is that communication is about reciprocation. This is a pretty big step for a guy who still has a flip phone.

I understand that social media tools have been around for a few years now, but what taught me the lesson that effective communication requires mutual engagement and interaction wasn’t signing up for Instagram. Teaching in the classroom has helped me understand that students are at their best when they feel like they have a voice and when they realize that they have important lessons to teach fellow students as well as the professor.

My sense of how to share information has changed, and now it’s time to learn the necessary skills for the task at hand. I can’t think of a better context in which to do it – the Office of Sustainability has been a wonderfully supportive and challenging environment. I’m excited about our new online magazine Synergies, because this publication is an awesome opportunity to take our Office’s capacity for communication to the next level. We are reaching out into the broader community and region and will therefore have even more opportunities for our students to learn new skills and perspectives in the process. I can’t wait to share what happens next.

Sharing Information and Sustainability

From Guest Blogger and Office Intern: Walter Blair

Half way through my summer internship with the Office of Sustainability, something important clicked for me – I have the opportunity to explain some of the projects I’ve been working on so far, but what I’d rather do is explain what clicked because it is the foundation of my work at the Office and the work I hope to do in years to come.

Here’s the last 8 years or so of my professional life and how I’ve grown to think about the importance of sharing information…described in two paragraphs!

I studied chemistry and biology in college but by graduation time wanted to do something more hands-on than lab work. I spent a year working at an aquarium (a sufficiently messy hands-on experience) and realized that I missed learning new things via research. Though I hadn’t quite experienced it in my undergraduate work, I was still intrigued by the joys of novel scientific discovery promised to every hopeful science student. A year after I decided that I wouldn’t ever be happy in a science lab, I entered the M.S. Marine Biology program here at the College. Having just finished that challenging and often frustrating research program, I realize now that my frustration is not with lab work, but it is with information itself.

I do want to discover new things, but I can’t stand the thought that the information I discover could be lost in the shuffle. Someone told me that the average number of citations for a peer-reviewed journal article is between 0 and 1, meaning that a fair number of article are never referenced by anyone. How frustrating! What is the point of generating new information no one will learn from it? Just as I felt at the end of my undergraduate work, I wanted to find work that I felt was more application-oriented…I wanted to make a real difference.

Whew! Well here I am as a summer intern with the Office of Sustainability. It wasn’t chemistry or marine biology that I wanted to work on this summer – it was information. There is so much to learn about the world we live in – the quantity of information to which we have access has exponentially exploded (how many people were there sharing their life stories online 20 years ago?), and our ability to sift through all of that mess to find quality information and to digest it so that we can make practical use of it has gotten exponentially harder. What we know is often limited to what Google places at the top of the search list, and everything else gets lost in the shuffle.

We have big ideas and goals at the Office, but we face the same problems with information that everyone else faces.

On our side of things, it is difficult to achieve a steady flow of information within the office. Each intern works incredibly hard on his or her projects and puts the necessary labor into research and information gathering in order to inform their progress, but a student-led group is always challenged with rapid turnover as students graduate and move on. In order to stand on one another’s shoulders to reach greater heights, we need to retain all of the information we gather and ensure that it is easily accessed and passed along.

On the other side of things, it is difficult to communicate what we’re doing with the community, because everyone else is struggling to keep up with exponentially growing quantities of information. We are faced with the challenge of organizing and presenting information in such a way that everyone in the community feels that he or she has the time and energy to share what we are trying to share.

The Office of Sustainability is committed to working on this information problem, and there are a number of projects we’re currently working on that we think will improve access to quality information for us and for our community. From establishing a publicly shared research database that allows anyone to access and quickly digest important peer-reviewed information, to developing our social network in order to share instant news and feedback on community projects, to experimenting with cutting edge web design to provide easy and intuitive access to information on recycling and other projects, we are working on the information problem.

There is so much quality information that is overlooked and so many curious minds don’t have access to it. For me, it’s been several years of frustration in the making, but I am convinced that what I want to do as an intern and what I want to do wherever my career takes me is to help people build and improve upon our vast human knowledge in order to reach a more sustainable future.