THINKeEXTENSION

[Image: Agro-housing will include rooftop vegetable plots; designed and rendered by Knafo Klimor Architects].

I just stumbled on this  BLDGBLOG’ post Going Agro. I believe wholeheartedly that the future of extension belongs to those extensionists who embrace eExtension, what I hadn’t thought about was the fundamental change that will happen in agriculture if more urban farming begins to happen. As Roof top farming takes off and initiatives like Farmadelphia get traction, there is a whole new audience in need of Extension.

The moral of the story.

The future is uncertain, the need for healthy food and fibre and a healthy environment is an absolute given. The eExtension presence you develop now will serve you as the future of Agriculture and the Environment unfolds. So dig your eExtension well before you need the water.

Tags: eExtension, UrbanFarming, Extension,

The December edition of  Journal of Extension newsletter has two great eExtension articles. These articles are valuable insights into clever Extensionist’s getting leverage from simple eExtension Strategies.

How to Make a Multidisciplinary IPM Guide for Growers Using Adobe PageMaker® Templates

Auto-Responders: An E-Mail List Productivity Tool

I predict that 2009 is going to be the year of eExtension, and I would suggest Extension programs with Autoresponders managing emails will be the rule rather than the exception.

Autoresponders make the task of managing email list far more easy, and make measurement, maintenance, and compliance with SPAM legislation simpler. There are an endless number of uses for Autoreposnders, but most people use them for managing newsletters or delivering course/ tutorial material periodically.

I use Aweber as the Autoresponder for my email campaigns as do 1000’s of others, if you would like to try AWeber for free, try this test drive below.

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In other eExtension news Wetlandcare Australia launched a Wetland Wiki. A wiki is a website that is designed for collaboration and is sometimes described as a cross between a website and a word processor. Wetlandcare Australia Wetland Wiki

[Disclosure: I am an AWeber affliate and will earn a small comission if you untimelately decide to purchase the AWeber service.]

Tags: eExtension, Journal of Extension, IPM, Autoresponder, AWeber, Innovative Extension

Steve Song is a big thinker, he recently spoke at a Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) workshop the Knowledge, Education, and Learning Workshop. The CGIAR ICT KM gang have been doing a great job of sharing their activity through thier Blip.tv channel.

If Twitter was an animal it would be a honey bee.

i.e. shows up everywhere, busily pollinating as it goes.

Twitter is an extraordinary free Social Media service that allows use to share short messages (limited to 140 characters) from your computer or by SMS from your mobile phone. The platform allows you to follow or subscribe to messages (called tweets) from other twitter users.

By searching Twitter for keywords in your areas of interested. It might be Integrated Pest Management, Entomology, and Bio-control you can find other Tweeps (a nickname for twitter users) to follow who are interested in the same things.

Before long your network will grow around the globe putting you in touch with people you might never otherwise meet and giving you access to a very rich stream of knowledge. It is also a great way to stay in touch with people you already know.

There are a burgeoning range of 3rd party Twitter applications sprouting up that make it a real power tool. One nice little mashup http://pipes.yahoo.com/mmmeeja/twitterfollowers can be used to create a world map of twitter follwers i.e. people subscribed to your twitter updates.

While it doesn’t capture all your followers, it’s a pretty groovy thing to see 100 of your followers on a map and visualise the global conversation taking place everytime you send a tweet.

Alright I know that THINKeEXTENSION is read by an International audience, however for the Aussies reading. Forrester have just released a report on the Australian Social Media landscape.
Australian Adult Social Technographics® Revealed by Steven Noble - Forrester Research

Tags: SocialMedia, THINKeEXTENSION

On Friday, I was privileged to the guest speaker at a local Agforce branch meeting. We discussed Youth to Agriculture, peculiar regulation regarding the movement of B-doubles (cattle trucks), and  funding opportunities available in our part of the world. We talked about the difficulty Primary Producers often face in trying to understand the language of Natural Resource Management NRM funding applications and for that mattter beaucratic speak and Agricultural Science.

Alex O’Neill is an Agforce Stalwart and was also a guest speaker at the meeting. This is an eExtension effort by Agforce sharing a television travel show story featuring Alex.

A call to arms for better Extension.

Over the last 7 years, I have observed Natural Resource Management NRM investment becoming more and more precise, and in some cases less and less accessible to the those who most need to understand. Biophysical targeting of investment and greater emphasis on monitoring and evaluation have lead to phrases such as “rehabilitation of endangered species in high priority ecosystems”. Which might be comprehensible to an earth science professional who wrote it, but probably doesn’t mean a thing to the grazing family who do have a number of endangered species on their property which happens to be home to a number of priority ecosystems. My argument is not against funding based on triage, but a call to arms to improve engagement for NRM initiatives, Agricultural Science and Environmental knowledge.

Google Earth and a simple eExtension Solution.

Millions of internet users now know the virtues of Google Earth. It’s free, it’s simple to use, and it has applications for eExtension. Imagine a Natural Resource Management organisation, who with a carefully thought out eExtension Strategy, slowly but surely develops a rapport with landholders in their region. Imagine that they provide information about forthcoming funding opportunities in rich eExtension media, building excitement, interest and buzz as they go. Imagine they have a grown a database of landholders who have become accustomed to receiving really useful NRM information on a regular basis.

Imagine 2 days before their latest funding round is released, the said NRM group releases a tutorial for landholders showing them how to download and install Google Earth and how to download and integrate layers from KML files exported from the NRM group’s GIS system. Landholders can then view a Google Map of their property, with layers provided the NRM group.

How much simpler would the application process be if the NRM group and say “go to your Google Map turn on the XYZ layer, if you have any green shapes on your property, they are the areas that are our priority for investment, please apply. So much easier than project that enhance “endangered species in high priority ecosystems”, where the landholder needs expert advice to find out if they qualify.

What are you doing with eExtension tools?

eExtension is popping up everywhere, so are broadband connections, so are free applications that allow this kind of scenario to be left for dead. If an NRM organisation hasn’t do this already, someone soon will (make KML files available to allow landholders to understand funding priorities)!

This is really just a very simple, crudely explained idea, but I reckon anyone working in NRM with a couple of days work could make this happen. Who will be the first group to do it. The University of Nevada just picked up a USDA award for thier eExtension initiative. Who will be the next to raise the bar?

If you or your organisation are using eExtension in a highly innovative way, (or maybe even in a really simple way) we’ll all love to hear from you, please leave us a video or a comment below. Til next time keep dreaming of the possibilities for eExtension

Tags: eExtension, Google Earth, Extension Strategy, Innovative Extension

eXtension is an eExtension initiative with a bold vision and now it has a USDA Secretary’s Honor Award to prove it. The Nevada News reports that Dean Karen Hinton and 24 team members accepted the award at a ceremony in Washington.

Hinton said the goal of eXtension is to be a trusted source of information for researchers and the general public alike and to minimize duplication and encourage teamwork between states. Team members attending the Washington, D.C., ceremony were honored and presented individual certificates at a luncheon hosted by the Research, Education, and Economics Mission Area and REE Undersecretary Gale Buchanan.”At the heart of eXtension is a commitment to service, understanding people’s educational needs and responding to those needs in a timely manner in technology formats of their choosing,” said Dan Cotton, eXtension director. “It’s about working collaboratively in ‘communities’ designed to produce the best the Cooperative Extension System has to offer. Receiving a USDA Secretary’s Honor Award is really an affirmation that Cooperative Extension is once again an organization of change and willing to step up and do whatever is necessary to serve the needs of the people.” source: Nevada News

eXtension has been profiled on THINKeEXTENSION before and has a clever team and great resources like this wiki of eExtension Resources underpinning it. Universities, not for profits (like Nature Conservancy) and other NGOs Landcare, Catchment Care, and Watershed Management groups are likely to lead the eExtension charge. With a few notable exceptions, most government departments (who may be the largest employers of Extensionists) seem to be having the most difficulty accepting the openness and mobility that successful Social Media and eExtension requires.

If you work in Extension for a government department who has not embraced eExtension, now is the time to agitate. To talk to management, to sneak into Internet Cafes (outside the department’s firewalls) and start creating simple eExtension content. The time is now.

What is your organisation doing about the impending eExtension demand? Let us know with a comment or video below!

Tags: eExtension, extension.org, Extension, Extension Strategy

A couple of days ago I recorded a video review of the Become a Blogger Premium Coaching offered by Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick.

In the video I spoke about the great value I have received from Yaro Starak over the last 3 years. I have done a coaching course with Yaro and found his material brilliant and exceptional value for money. If you have been reading THINKeEXTENSION for some time you will know that I don’t use it to flog product. However Become a Blogger Premium Coaching is a product I have absolute confidence in, and I have no hesitation in recommending it to you.

Like I said in the video I am an affliate of Gideon and Yaro’s and stand to earn a commission should you purchase the links in this post. However if you discount my enthusiam by half to allow for any bias on my behalf, you will still find a sincere recommendation for this product Become a Blogger Premium Coaching.

However I have an adament recomendation, even if you don’t see value in signing up for the coaching. At the very least please make your way over to Become a Blogger and download the free Become a Blogger Roadmap, it will literally save you months of work. True to his form for overdelivering Yaro has even provided some more free videos on the signup page once again if you don’t make a purchase make sure you don’t miss this free content.

In the future when Agricultural, Natural Resource Management, or Environmental extension will be one discipline. Equally balancing hard and soft science, cultural, social, economic and ecological dimensions.

Small, smart, svelte organisations and innovative individuals will provide Extension services to Governments, Universities, and others wanting to reach their audience.

Extension initiatives will appear in a stream of content that the audience receive from their trusted service provider. An instant “community of practice” will form around this new content, slicing, dicing and adding to the new Extension content using video, voice, real time data from loggers on farms, in streams, embedded in indicator species.

The future is closer than you think.

This week Nielsen reported Twitter (a microblogging application to allows rapid sharing of information) has grown by more than 363% in the last 12 months. Stargazer Perennials reports that setting up blogs and an online store has doubled their income and put them in touch with their market.

The future is here and it is constrained only by your imagination.

Oh and those small, smart, svelte organisations and innovative individuals, they got started in eExtension ahead of the curve. They used free, simple to use Social Media tools to start building their audience in 2008.

A good eExtension Strategy has 3 pillars

• Listening - using social media applications to listen to the content and conversations taking place in your industry/niche/specialty and listening to your audience.
• Sharing - using a integrated mix of social media tools to share rich media with your audience and have them share with you and one another.
• Connecting - using social networks and other web 2.0 properties to build a “communities of practice” around your extension products.

The sharing should almost always 99.9% of the time be based around a blog platform (maybe in some exceptional cases other technologies will be more suitable). The blog content managment system provides a powerful foundation on which other social media properties in your eExtension Strategy can mesh.

A blogs are a wide range of website that have some common features;

• easy to edit and publish
• publish articles in reverse chronological order
• creates a “feed” of content that makes it easy for readers to subscribe to
• Usually allows readers to comment and respond content

Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick have created some fantastic resources for anyone wanting to know more about blogging. Thier Become a Blogger Videos and Become a Blogger Roadmap provide instruction to take a begginer from registering a domain name to building a blog with authority, readership, and rich content.

If you are seroius about developing a world class eExtension Strategy, then you need to learn how to become an authority blogger.  If you are serious about become an authority blogger in your Extension field, then I suggest that you head over to Become a Blogger and sign up for the free roadmap.

I mentioned in the video review above the Gideon and Yaro will soon be releasing premium content (coaching, lessons and other resources) to support beggining bloggers to become authority bloggers. I must disclose that I am an affliate of Gideon and Yaro’s, so if you do decide to purchase thier product I may recieve some renumeration.

As I say in the video at the very least head over to Become a Blogger and sign up for the Become a Blogger Roadmap. Evaluate their premium offer for yourself, however don’t miss out on this really valuable free content.