Immediately following my presentation at the USAIN conference I truck down to Columbus and fly to Raleigh, NC for the National Extension Technology Conference (NETC). Steve Lichtensteiger (OSU Extension Regional System’s Tech) and I present an overview of a blended e-learning program conducted at Ohio State last year. I’ve also scheduled several other meetings throughout the conference, including one on developing a proposed virtual book club.
More posts as the conference nears. I also hope to post a bit more during the conference like I did in 2006 (see here, here, here, here, and here).
I’m putting the final touches on an upcoming pre-conference about Web 2.0’s impact on agriculture information specialists from USAIN (United States Agricultural Information Network). Extension professionals should be aware of USAIN. They focus on policy and other issues around agriculture information. Take a few minutes and poke around their website. The librarians at your ag library probably are involved with USAIN.
I’m looking forward to a fun teaching and conversation session!
Not so good news from today’s NY Times article by David Leonhardt. It’s never encouraging when an article starts with these four lead sentences:
If history is a reliable guide, the recession of 2008 is now unavoidable.
The dismal jobs report released Friday showed overall employment to be lower than it was three months ago. Every time such a slump has occurred since the early 1970s, a recession has followed — or already been under way.
And if the good times have really ended, they were never that good to begin with. Most American households are still not earning as much annually as they did in 1999, once inflation is taken into account. Since theCensus Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, a prolonged expansion has never ended without household income having set a new record.
Implications for Extension include more programming to meet increased economic stresses, community economic development strategies. And once again we need consider the impacts on Extension funding and budgets. It also forces us to consider more uses of technology and new organizational systems like Extension 2.0.
It feels like a matter of weeks since I last posted and it’s really been months. Kind of the way life feels like these days. I’m forever committing to multiple projects. A great (and quick read) on the need to focus and on getting more done by doing less busywork is Graham Alexander’s Tales from the top. Some more good advice comes from a post from Dwayne Melacon’s Genuine Curiosity blog. Dwayne recommends a simple system. Taking the top few items that are critical to get done each day and putting them on an index card. Dwayne calls it his “Daily Watch” list and creates it from the multiple project lists he maintains (this follow’s David Allen’s Getting Things Done).
Good advice for Extension professionals caught in daily white water. If you can’t at least focus on your key commitments for at least some of each day they will slip away.
Andrew McAfee has been a leading academic voice for Enterprise 2.0. For about four more weeks you can get his article “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” from the MIT Sloan Management Review for free. Here is the link.
This is a great summary of Enterprise 2.0 and includes McAfee’s idea of SLATE (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, Signals), some ground rules for organizations (make the offerings easy to use and do not impose structures on how the work is done or categorized), the roles managers will play (standard platform, having a receptive culture) and challenges and opportunities. Great, quick read. Highly recommended.
I’ve had a busy month that’s kept me away from posting. My family is continuing to deal with flood damage and lot’s of administrative stuff to deal with at OSU Extension. Time to get some stuff posted!
Wired has some basic intro points on using Facebook. Very brief, somewhat general, but also useful.
I’ve been lazily thumbing through Mark Frauenfelder’s book Rule the Web for the last several weeks. Then I came across this review by Kevin Kelly in his Cool Tools site (highly recommend site!). Kevin gives a nice, brief review. The book focuses on how to use the web more efficiently and effectively. Hence the subtitle “How to do anything and everything on the internet – better, faster, easier”.
Cool and useful stuff. Read Kevin’s review and see his example. Some of the things I learned include finding promo codes, using a mobile phone to check prices while in a store, getting magazine articles, how to use one time credit card numbers and a host of other neat tricks. Like Kevin I’ve found myself ear-tagging several pages and marking them up. This is also a great book to simply jump around and look for the cool stuff. I’ve been skimming it and just simply opening it up to a section. The sections are brief and easy to use.
Mark is a creator of Boing Boing. If you are online a lot this book will be useful. Highly recommended.
OK, I’ve been on a lot of vacation over the last two months. Coupled with a lot of administrative work. Now it’s time to get back to work and do some posting. The interest in Extension 2.0 and Web 2.0 work has continued to increase, so more info to post on these topics!
Just like having a deep (or high, or sprawling among several rooms) collection of books, I also seem to have a full collection of recorded shows on my DVR. Right now I’m working through It’s All Geek to Me from the Science Channel. These are 30 minute shows hosted by David Pogue, the NY Times Technical columnist. So far I’ve watched the shows about digital cameras, cell phones and iPods. There very good, especially if you have a limited introduction to these tools.
They’re good because Pogue is good. Pogue’s background includes the theatre and he uses an entertaining and humorous delivery method. Much of the shows takes place either on the streets of New York or in tech stores.
Here is a list of upcoming shows. See also Pogue’s show notes for the tips and ideas he shares. David also has a cool site. All are highly recommended.