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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[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

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

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

Blogs

• bioGUID – an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by providing resolvable URIs for biological objects
• Bird Supertree – an experiment in “open source phylogenetics”
• iPhylo – brain dump of ideas on phyloinformatics
• iSpecies – a record of the development of the iSpecies search engine
• Of Birds and Lice – about host-parasite co-evolution in general with an emphasis on host-parasite co-speciation in lice and birds
• Semant – a record of efforts to create a triple store for data about ants, and related musings

Photosharing

• Flickr – Roderic uses a free Flickr account to share photos

Microblogging

• Twitter – allows Roderic to update and converse with his Twitter contacts quickly

Aggregation Service

• Friendfeed – Roderic uses to aggregate much of his online content in one place

Social Networks

• LinkedIn – Roderic’s profile on LinkedIn

• Facebook – Roderic uses Facebook to stay in touch with friends and contacts

• Technorati – tracks blog conversations

Social Bookmarking

• Delicious – allows Roderic to share great content he finds on the web with anyone who is interested

Believe it or not there are more places to find Roderic online, however by now I think you get the point, he’s a “hyper connected power user“.

The amazing thing is all these services listed above are free, so cost is no barrier to getting started in eExtension. In addition none of these services require technical skill beyond what you have required to find this website or send an email today.

The reason I wanted to write about Roderic today, is the innovative way he is approaching the visualisation of taxonomy for studies he wishes to share online. This one is especially for the biologists, zoologists, ecologists and flora and fauna geeks. Roderic describes his solution below.

For each paper I extract the taxonomic names (via the Genbank sequences linked to the paper), group them into genera, and then construct a treemap where the size of each cell is proportional to the number of species in each genus. Then I harvest images from Flickr and/or Yahoo’s image search APIs and display a thumbnail with a link to the image source. Source: iPhylo: What is a study about? Treemaps of taxa

The entire article describing Roderic’s creation of the treemaps can be found at iPhylo: What is a study about? Treemaps of taxa.

The friction associated with Extensionists and Researchers engaging in this type of innovation becomes significantly less, with content being freely shared on the internet and with the ease of integrating of tools like those mentioned above. The images Roderic uses from Flickr have all been shared using a Creative Commons license, which allows content owners to set guidelines for how their content can be used by others. In return those sharing the content receive more exposure for their contribution.

As more people and organisations like Roderic, use eExtension to fearlessly share knowledge that can improve agriculture and our environment, our world can only become a better place. Then innovation like Roderic’s Taxonomy Treemap can flourish and accelerate the global response to the challenges agriculture and environment face. Naturally these tools and content can also provide very local and private solutions as well at times when that is appropriate.

What’s on your wish list for Agricultural and or Environmental knowledge advancement? Leave us a comment below, so the collective brainpower of all THINKeEXTENSION readers can begin to address it.

Tags: eExtension, Taxonomy-Treemap, Extension, Visualising-Research

Extension is a business of reaching out, of enabling, a business of dare I say it “Yes We Can”.

One Laptop Per Child OLTP is a “Yes We Can” idea and a movement with a mission to provide school age children in developing countries with their own laptop. This type of initiative will fuel the trend, that will see 3 Billion people online in the next couple of years. OLTP is an amazing effort that gives people access to ideas that can improve their world, and maybe some that won’t (however in an information age, we all need to learn to filter good ideas from bad).

To my way of thinking the concept that links these two ideas (world hunger and universal internet access) is eExtension. If we can be laptops to every school child in the world, using eExtension we can get good Extension Support to the whole of planet. Whether your audience in within a 50km radius or global, good eExtension will enable healthy vibrant agriculture (producing good food and fibre) and a healthy environment (producing good air, water, climate and the countless blessing that come from our planet).

“Yes We Can”

(apologies and congrats to Obama)

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is simply a stream of information most commonly blog posts, podcasts, videos, or images that can be subscribed to. For example if you subscribe to a blog with an RSS Feed Reader like Google Reader. You will receive blog articles as they are published, much like an email inbox for feeds.

I use Google Reader to subscribe to numerous RSS Feeds that help me to stay abreast of my industry.By using a number of keyword tracking tools in tandem with Google Reader I recieve an alert when Web Content is published and is associated with one of my keywords.

Yesterday scanning quickly through my feeds in Google Reader, I found a keyword alert that included a name I knew well. The name of someone I have worked with and have a great deal of respect for, Phil Moran from Noosa Landcare Group.

The keyword I was tracking was “Landcare” and the alert landed in my Feed Reader because Landcare Australia Limited posted a photo of Phil in to thier Flickr account. Flickr is a Web2.0 photosharing website that allows users to upload images and share them across the web in dozens of different ways. Flickr automatically creates an RSS feed for each user (a stream of photos that you can subscribe to), and every time a photo is uploaded the RSS Feed for that user is updated.

Fortunately when Phil’s photo was uploaded to Landcare Australia Limited’s photostream on Flickr it was tagged “Landcare”. It was that tag that set off the course of events, that saw the alert land in my Google Feed Reader. Amazing stuff! Looking a little bit further through the photos, I also found a image of another colleague, Paul Marshall speaking to the Minister for the Environment Peter Garrett no less. Actually there was quite a list of the who’s who of Australian NRM amongst the happy snaps.

Now think about this if Landcare Australia Limited had uploaded this same photo to a web site that didn’t have an RSS Feed, chances are I wouldn’t have found out about it. Landcare Australia Limited have been stepping up in the Social Media stakes lately by trialling a Wordpress blog, using Youtube Videos, and creating an interactive website to promote the National Landcare Awards, I have already talked about why their move to a free blogging platform is more powerful that using their current CMS powered website which has no RSS and it difficult to interact with.

Two Take Home Messages:

• RSS helps you share and listen to content that is important in your industry, niche, or specialty. Start using it today.
• Flickr is a free photosharing website (there are some limits to the basic free membership, not many though), that is tremendous eExtension Tool. Start sharing photos from workshops, field trips, covers of reports, any Extension content you can via Flickr then tell your audience many of them will already be using Flickr and it will give you one more way to connect.

Now here are the photos.

(left) Phil Moran (Noosa Landcare Guru) presenting at the National Landcare Awards. (right) A little bit further on I found one of Paul Marshall as well.

Tags: RSS, eExtension, eExtension Strategy, Flickr, Extension

What is RSS?

RSS is a format that makes it easy to keep track of new web content. It’s like a stream of updates. Similar to the ticker tape feed of news headlines, that you might see on the bottom of a screen on a TV News show.

Before RSS if we wanted to track new content, news and other updates on a website. We would probably bookmark the site and check back on a regular basis. However if your Extension Website or any site for that matter is configured for RSS, visitors can subscribe to updates.

Once subscribed to an RSS feed, readers will be informed when new content is added without having to revisit the website.

Because RSS is more like grammar than a whole new computer language. It can be applied to all types of content; Blogs, Podcasts, updates to a Wiki, Photos, Videos, etc. Almost any web content as long as it is granular i.e. discreet units of data, it can usually be turned into an RSS feed. To receive or “catch” an RSS feed you can use an RSS Feed Reader, some websites also offer their RSS feed via email.

To catch an RSS feed you need an RSS Feed Reader.

An RSS Feed Reader is a bit like an email inbox, however instead of catching emails it catches feeds. Below is a screenshot of my Google Reader, a free and powerful tool that can rapidly provide an overview of news in your industry, your Agricultural or Environmental niche, or your sphere of interest.

There are a wide range of RSS Feed Readers available, however they fall mainly into 2 categories; Online and Desktop. An Online RSS Feed Reader is a bit like webmail, think hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail, etc, where you have a private webpage that you log into to read your feeds. Bloglines, A variation on the Online RSS Feed Reader is the Start Page which is your own personalized page that opens when you launch the internet on your computer. A Start page usually has a miriad of options for displaying feeds and other widgets. Some options include iGoogle, Pageflakes, and Netvibes.

Desktop RSS Feed Readers are applications that run on your own computer, think Outlook, Outlook Express Thunderbird, Mail. The great advantage of these applications is that you can download your feeds when you have internet access and read them when you don’t (although you won’t be able to click on any links. Also some sources publish only a summary of their feeds, without internet access you only be getting a snippet of the story). Desktop applications you might like to consider are FeedDemon (windows) RSSOwl (windows, mac, linux, solaris) NetNewsWire (mac).

There are of course many variations such as Feed Readers for mobile phones, email applications that incorporate RSS Feed Readers, browser based readers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Flock for example all have Feed Readers and all sorts of mashups. Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of all manner of RSS Feed Readers.

To recap briefly, an RSS feed is a stream of web content that can be subscribe to, aggregated, shared and shifted in many useful ways. Publishing your Extension content via an RSS feed will

• make it easier for your stakeholders and your target markets to subscribe to your content
• make it easier for your stakeholders and your target markets to share your content with peers
• you will be better able to monitor which content is being consumed and which is not
• it will consolidate all your content (text, images, audio, and video) into easy to follow stream
• it will make it easy for you mash up various components of your Extension Program in one or many rich media locations

How add an RSS to site requires more space then we have in this blog post, if you would like to know how. Can I suggest you subscribe to THINKeEXTENSION, there will be more on RSS over the next couple of weeks. You could also leave a comment below.

Not only does RSS provide all these benefit when publishing, getting to understand and use RSS will give you a powerful ability to listen to your industry or niche. Once you set us an RSS Feed Reader for yourself, you will be able to track knowledge sources, conversations and keywords related to your niche or industry. Within minutes of an authority in your industry announcing a breakthrough, you can be reading, listening to or watching an update.

Bottom line: If you are not currently publishing your Extension Content via RSS, then now is the time to start. If you are not using RSS to stay on top of what is happening in your industry, your niche, your specialty, then expect to be moving into the last to know group in your field.

Monty C. M. Metzger is an entrepreneur, trend consultant and blogger from Germany who recently published on his blog
a list of 300 businesses who have an active social media presence. It’s worth a look there are some very clever strategies amongst them. Let’s have a look at some Monty’s examples.

American Red Cross uses a blog Red Cross Chat, as the centre for their Social Media strategy which is a really smart idea. However they also use other Social Media tools to bulk up their presence including Delicious (social book marking), Flickr (photo sharing), Utterli ), Youtube (Video Sharing), Sprout (widget maker), Facebook (Social Network), Twitter (Microblogging). All of these tools can be used for free provided you have a computer and an internet connection. So whether you have a small Landcare or Environmental group or you work for a government department you can have a configuration like Red Cross for your eExtension Strategy

The National Marine Sanctuaries amongst other Socail Media tools, Twitter. Twitter is a Microblogging platform which allows users to post a short message (max 140 characters) easily to the web. Those messages can then be posted on websites, read as a feed, received as text messages on a mobile phone and dozens of other nifty things.

The Sydney Writers’ Centre like the Red Cross uses blogging, podcasting and 2 social networks: Facebook fan page. MySpace page to spread their message and engage their audience.

Timberland uses the tree planting program is an incentive to have Facebook users share their Earthkeepers application with friends.

As you can see from these couple of examples many organisations are using Social Media to engage and interact with their clients, their audience and others. There are many creative and meaningful ways to engage your Extension audience with Social Media. The first step is to develop an eExtension Strategy that will complement and enhance your current Extension workflow. If you would like to know more about developing a eExtension Strategy you may wish to subscribe to THINKeEXTENSION or browse our Archives

What Social Media tools have you seen Extension programs using or are you using? Leave us a comment below

Tags: SocialMedia, eExtensionStrategy, ExtensionWebsite

Video

A blog is a simple but powerful tool, it’s a partticular type of website that is;

• easy to update (you don’t need a web designer)
• it’s automatically files and archives content in an easy to search / find format
• it serves up dates as a feed (i.e. readers can subscribe and get latest articles without having to check your website all the time)
• they perform spectacularly well with search engines
• they engage audiences usually allowing comments and other forms of interaction.

Your professional (and personal) life will be significantly enhanced by writing one and reading many. There are estimated to be over 100 Million blogs worldwide and a 100 000 new blogs created every day. Why? Because it’s free or close to it, easy to do, and it’s very very powerful. What’s more, a blog can be the foundation of an eExtension Strategy.

So your eExtension Tip today, is a task that can take you 15 mins or less and costs nothing. If you’re not sure what eExtension is, you might like to start like by reading a definition of eExtension.

eExtension Tip #1: Try blogging, start a wordpress.com blog.

To become more familiar with blogs and blogging, I suggest you go to http://wordpress.com and sign up for a free blog. It doesn’t matter if you write some nonsense in it once, use it to write about a hobby, or write about your current Extension project. The act of diving in and having a go will give you more insight than a dozen tutorial.

Want a Blogging Challenge?

Here is a little challenge to make this eExtension Tip a little bit more fun. It’s simple and everyone who completes the challenge will go into the draw for free 1/2 hour eExtension Consultation (Value = $150 Australia).

1. visit http://wordpress.com
2. sign up for a free blog
3. write an article that includes a link to this article
4. keep reading THINKeEXTENSION or even better subscribe to find out who wins.

The Prize

A eExtension Consultation by phone or Skype where you can pick my brains for half an hour, the call will be recorded and a copy sent to you along with a transcript of the call, pretty neat hey? We’ll arrange a time that is convenient to both of us. You might like to use the call to review your current eExtension Strategy or to design one from scratch. I will randomly draw a winner on Friday afternoon 14th November Eastern Australian Time and announce the winner here on THINKeEXTENSION

Tags: Competition, Blogging, ExtensionBlog, ExtensionWebsite, eExtensionWebsite, eExtensionBlog, Wordpress