National eXtension Initiative

Three outstanding speakers have been confirmed for the eXtension National Conference, October 20-23, 2009 in St. Louis, MO. Bob Johansen (top left), author of “Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World,” Russ Roberts (bottom left), CEO and founder of Russ Roberts, Limited, a management consultant and executive coach for both Fortune 500 companies and start ups, and Tara Hunt (top right), author of “The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business” and a leading authority on online communities will keynote this conference.

Speakers for sixty concurrent sessions have been notified and a number of panel discussions are being programmed during the 4-day conference. Registration and hotel information can be found at: http://about.extension.org/2009-extension-national-conference/

As of August 1, 2009, nearly 11,000 of all approximately 15,000 Cooperative Extension Service professionals had eXtension IDs. We’re working to increase that number to 100 percent!

One of the first steps to being fully engaged with the eXtension initiative is to create this eXtension ID. By doing so you’ll be allowed to work in the eXtension collaborative space, you can become a member of one of nearly 40 Communities of Practice, and you’ll be registered to receive routine email updates on the initiative.

If you don’t have your ID yet, it’s a simple process! Just go to
http://people.extension.org and you’ll be taken to the registration page.

Encourage your friends and colleagues in Cooperative Extension to do so today!

eXtension’s professional development opportunities are open to all Cooperative Extension faculty, staff and employees. No pre-registration. Please share this announcement with others and encourage them to pick a topic and try it out!

30-MINUTE SESSIONS
This month we are offering 30-minute sessions on a several topics including Getting Started Answering Ask an Expert questions, Ask an Expert Widget, and Moodle. Give us 30 minutes and we’ll teach you something useful! These sessions will be held at our Web Conferencing Center at http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/learn and your telephone. Plan to join the session 5 minutes before the starting time. Each session will be held at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. CT, Noon MT, 11:00 a.m. PT, 10:00 a.m. AT; 8:00 a.m. HT) unless otherwise noted.

* August 11 at 2:00 p.m. ET, a 30-minute session on The Ask eXtension Widget – Aaron Hundley, eXtension Software Engineer. How to use the Ask eXtension widget to receive and answer questions directly from your county Extension web site or Extension-related blog. This widget adds question-asking capabilities to your site, but uses the power of the eXtension Ask an Expert and FAQ systems to assist you in answering. Take questions from your clients, and use the 40,000 questions in the FAQ system to assist you in providing a timely and accurate answer. Check out the widget-tracking feature that allows you to name the widget and monitor questions coming from your site. Also learn about the widget routing capability that will allow you to have questions routed to you from your widgets. This session will introduce you to the tool, show you the latest features developed, and will discuss what is necessary to begin using it immediately in your own county sites and blogs with helpful tips. (For all Extension)

* August 25, 2009 at 2:00 p.m. ET, a 30-minute session on Repurposing content for Moodle – Jennifer Jahedkar, Texas AgriLife Extension, Extension eLearning. (For all Extension)

* August 26 at 2:00 p.m. ET, a 30-minute session on Getting Started Answering AaE Questions – Kevin Gamble, eXtension. This session will show you how it works, how to get started, setting your preferences, creating your profile, getting involved in answering either through an eXtension Community of Practice, or by answering questions where there are no communities. We’ll also discuss general question answering guidelines and etiquette. Answering questions can be kind of fun and we’d love to have many more Extension professionals participating. (For CoPs and all Extension)

OTHER SESSIONS
* August 11 at 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. ET, Meet-up of Technology Trainers and anyone else interested in discussing the best way of teaching social media to extension staff in your state. Possible questions to address might include: What kinds of information do you typically cover in discussing social media (i.e. blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc)? Do you devote entire sessions to a single topic (i.e. creating blogs) or do you cover a variety? What kinds of hands on experiences have worked best for your audiences in learning these topics? (For all Extension) This session will be held at our Web Conferencing Center at http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/learn.

* August 27 at 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. ET, Meet-up of Ask an Expert Question Wranglers. Want to help people find answers to their questions? Work with your Extension colleagues from across the country? Help to serve Extension clientele in a new and exciting way? Become an eXtension Question Wrangler! We have opportunities for our public to ask questions through our “Ask an Expert” system, but in order to ramp-up this effort we need good people to volunteer to help make this a reality. If you think this is something you’d like to do please join us to talk about how we can handle this together. (For all who have signed up as Question Wranglers… or might want to become one. To sign up, go to https://people.extension.org/communities/38 and Join). This session will be held at our Web Conferencing Center at http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/learn.

SECOND LIFE
Second Life is an immersive 3-D virtual environment, inhabited by over a million users from all over the world. You can learn to use Second Life to meet with colleagues, to create 3-D models that would be too expensive or impossible to make in reality, to provide guest speakers for a real life group, to teach using role play or group problem solving, to make content in your subject area available to a worldwide audience. This is an emerging and transformative technology, much like the early days of the Internet, and is expected to change the way most people experience web content within the next five years.

In Second Life, you will find that eXtension has a virtual fairgrounds, a model county office, projects in development on assistive technology, turf grass, pest management, and more. In Teen Second Life, we have Bailey Island available for any 4-H educator to use for programming. Each month eXtension hosts several community events in Second Life. It is best to spend two or three hours orienting yourself to the Second Life environment before attending an event. You should know how to walk, sit, chat, use voice, and teleport.

Instructions for entering Second Life are here:
http://collaborate.extension.org/wiki/Cooperative_Extension_Second_Life_Educators

LuAnn Phillips, Second Life educator, is available to assist you, and can be reached at luann.phillips@extension.org or by instant message to Thynka Little in Second Life.

Please consider joining the Facebook group “Cooperative Extension Second Life”.

August Second Life Events:
* August 6, Second Life Roundtable 2:30-3:30 p.m. ET — web conference, meet at http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/learn Topic: Reports on current projects and Open Discussion/ Bring your topic!

* August 7, Second Life Meetup — 11:00 a.m. -12:30 p.m. SL time (Pacific),
2:00-3:30 p.m. ET. Meet at the Virtual State Fair, Morrill Island, in Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/Morrill/130/174/25 Topic: Avatar Appearance – learn about many options for changing the look of your avatar. Then hop on the freebie tour and round up some amazing stuff!

* August 28, Second Life Meetup — 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. SL time (Pacific),
2:00-3:30 p.m. ET. Meet at the Virtual State Fair, Morrill Island, in Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/Morrill/130/174/25 Topic: Cool Tools for Educators – see a demo of some useful scripted items used for teaching in SL, many are free!

Add these dates & topics to your calendar, and plan to join us on for one or more of these sessions in August!!

TO PARTICIPATE in any of the sessions held in our Web Conferencing Center…
1. Five minutes before the start time, go to our Web Conferencing Center meeting room at http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/learn.

2. You will be presented with a login screen that has an “Enter as Guest” option.

3. Enter your first name, your last name, and your institution/university, then click the “Enter Room” button to join the conference.

4. To hear the audio of the workshop and participate in the Q&A portion of the workshop we will be using a built-in teleconferencing capability of Adobe’s Connect Pro conferencing software. Once you log into the meeting you will be presented with the option to enter your call-back number, your phone will automatically be called. After entering your number you will be automatically called and joined into the audio portion of the Web conference on your phone.

EMAIL LIST:
If you or a colleague would like to get notices about upcoming professional development sessions offered by eXtension, go to https://people.extension.org/communities/learn and Click “Join Community.

RECORDINGS:
Recordings of many past professional development sessions can be found at the main eXtension wiki at http://about.eXtension.org/wiki and scroll down under Professional Development heading and find “Recordings of eXtension Professional Development Sessions”, or search on the word Recordings.

Looking forward to having you join us to learn something new in August!!

Three Communities of Practice were recently launched by eXtension within the past few weeks: Bee Health, Urban Integrated Pest Management, and Families, Food, and Fitness. Each of these communities has developed a variety of resources critical to Americans today. eXtension has developed news releases for use in your state related to these three recent launches. Please feel free to customize and use these releases for your state:

July 21 — Bee Health is Focus of New National Web Resource
July 23 — Urban Pest Management New Feature on Web Site
July 28 — New Web Resource Helps Americans Eat Smart, Move More and Achieve Healthy Weight

Contact information about each of these newly launched Communities of Practice can be found at the end of each posted release.

eXtension’s public outreach Moodle site, http://campus.extension.org, continues to grow significantly in both number of courses and number of users. User accounts at this site have increased from 839 in March to nearly 2,500 at the end of July, with the number of courses available or under development increasing from 92 in March to 150. Recent courses to go live at this site include Texas 4-H Child Protection, Backyard and Local Foods (Ohio Master Gardener), Center Pivots, and Louisiana 4-H Volunteer Training & Development. Some of the more frequently visited courses include Get to the Point with 4-H Presentations, Horse Adult Leader Level One, North Dakota Master Gardener, and Basic Sustainable Agriculture.

The professional development courses at http://pdc.extension.org are similarly increasing, where the number of users increased from 416 in March to 1,376 today, and courses increased from 35 to 131. Some 60 of these courses were recreated from courses previously part of the Southern Region’s Cooperative Extension Curriculum Project. Of particular note among these courses are 20 that address the 4-H Professional Research, Knowledge, and Competency Model. These 20 peer reviewed courses were developed by 4-H specialists from at least seven different institutions across the country. Other popular courses at this site include IT Security, Risk Management and Insurance Basics, Evaluating Extension Programs, and Moodle 101. As a reminder, access to courses at this site requires the use of your eXtension ID.

Please visit these sites to get more information about other available course offerings. For questions about these sites or to find out how you can use Moodle for your own educational program development and delivery, send an email to moodlehelp@extension.org.

The University of California ANR Communication Services team is in the process of making their Master Gardener Volunteer Management System (VMS) available to other Extension programs throughout the country. The system includes hour reporting, calendaring, roster management, newsletter management and many other features, giving your MG programs a full-featured system of record keeping and reporting.

This is a mature system with over seven years of upgrades and improvements. Master Gardeners report that they are very happy with the features and ease of use, while County and Statewide administrators have the control and report functions they need. California is offering this as a hosted service with a yearly fee based on participating state population.

For more information about this system, contact: Karl Krist, web team manager. (kakrist@ucdavis.edu or 530-754-3939) or view http://ucanr.org/mg.cfm.

Edition 1.5 of the state and institutional reports has just been released and includes data from January-June, 2009. This report is intended to keep you informed of eXtension activity that can be reported by state and institutions. The report includes state and institutional metrics from the eXtension public website (visits, pageviews, cities visiting, average pageviews per visit, average time on the site, and the percentage of new people visiting the site). It also includes metrics on Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) from states and institutions, as well as individuals with eXtension IDs and their membership in Communities of Practice (CoP) from states and institutions. Our next edition (2.0) will be published in January 2010 and include data from January-December, 2009.

To access your report, go to

http://about.extension.org/wiki/eXtension_State_and_Institutional_Reports

and then scroll down and click on your state to view your report.

We hope that this report will provide you with important data about your state and institutional involvement in eXtension.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact Mike Lambur (mike.lambur@extension.org).

The eXtension fellowship program provides opportunities for qualified individuals, within or outside of Cooperative Extension, to work temporarily through either sabbatical leave or other contractual arrangements with eXtension on specific projects that contribute to the Initiative as well as to the individual.

Until last year, applications were received and considered on a first-come, first-served basis. Because the number of applications has increased, we found it necessary to change our application procedure to give all applicants an equal opportunity to be selected.

The program will operate on a calendar year basis (i.e., January – December). The deadline for applications will be October 31 for the next calendar year. Applications for the 2010 calendar year are due by October 31, 2009. Once all proposals are received, they will be reviewed and selections will be made based on proposal merit, contribution to eXtension, and available funding.

To see the eXtension fellowship program details, go to:
http://about.extension.org/wiki/eXtension_Fellowship_Program

For more information, please contact Mike Lambur (mike.lambur@extension.org).

The Managing in Tough Times resource directory, MiTTNet, officially launched July 30, 2009. The directory can be accessed at: http://mittnet.extension.org. It is fully searchable and nearly 900 resources can be found in individual and family, farm and ranch, community, and youth topic areas. A national web conference to announce MiTTNet, to demonstrate the site and highlight its contents was held on July 30. For those who could not attend, the web conference can be viewed at: http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p78987985/

To learn more about Managing in Tough Times contact Lyla Houglum at lyla.houglum@oregonstate.edu, Jane Schuchardt at jschuchardt@csrees.usda.gov, or Tom Coon, ECOP Programs Sub-Committee and Michigan State University Extension Director, coontg@msu.edu.

eXtension’s Virtual News Room continues to grow with 309 releases from 34 institutions. The hot topics for July were gardening, corn & soybeans, personal finance, and fitness.

Source of July news releases
Oklahoma State University–25
Kansas State University–25
North Dakota State University–21
University of Illinois–19
University of Arkansas–19
Iowa State University –18
Ohio State University–17
University of Missouri–16
Mississippi State University–14
Texas Cooperative Extension–13
Penn State University–12
Purdue University–11
University of Nebraska–9
Montana State University–9
Oregon State University–8
University of Nevada –7
University of Minnesota–7
Utah State University –5
University of Wisconsin–5
University of California–5
Washington State University–4
University of Georgia–4
Cornell University–4
University of Kentucky–3
Michigan State University–3
University of Maine–2
South Dakota State University–2
Clemson University–2
Alabama Cooperative Extension–2
Virginia Cooperative Extension–1
University of New Hampshire–1
University of Idaho–1
Rutgers University–1
New Mexico State University–1
Other sources–9
Original releases–4

TOTAL–309

eXtension news releases are posted by category at http://www.extension.org/all/news. Use the drop-down menu to sort news by topic area.

Gardens, lawns, & landscapes–50
Corn and soybean production–41
Personal finance–26
Families, food and fitness –25
Beef cattle–18
Dairy–16
Family caregiving–16
Entrepreneurship–15
Parenting–13
Horses–11
Youth SET –8
Animal manure management–7
Organic production–7
Ag energy–7
Agrosecurity and floods–6
Surviving wildfire–6
Bee health–6
Wildlife damage management–5
Geospatial technologies–4
Diversity–3
Cotton industry–3
Pest management–3
Small companion animals–3
Imported fire ants–2
Goats–2
Marine fisheries–2
Small meat processors–1
Drinking water–1
Swine–1
Freshwater aquaculture–1

TOTAL–309