Archive for the ‘Extension 2.0’ Category

Off to South Dakota Tomorrow

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Tomorrow I fly to South Dakota to speak at the South Dakota Cooperative Extension Service’s annual conference on Thursday.  I’m mostly presenting on technology tools and their applications to Extension work, along with some connections to generational differences.

I’m excited about the trip. I’ve never been to South Dakota and am looking forward to visiting Sioux Falls and then Brookings and South Dakota State University. I’m even more excited about talking to Extension peers about the tools that can help to create a 21st Century Extension professional.

Posted in Extension 2.0, General Extension, Organizational Development/Strucuture, Technology, Tools | 4 Comments »

NETC’s Coming Soon!

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

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).

Posted in Extension 2.0, Technology, Tools | No Comments »

USAIN Pre-conference Workshop

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

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!

Posted in Extension 2.0, Technology, Tools | No Comments »

Dreary Economic News

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

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.

Posted in Extension 2.0, General Extension | No Comments »

McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0

Monday, October 1st, 2007

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.

Posted in Extension 2.0, Futurism, Technology | 1 Comment »