National eXtension Initiative

As Extension professionals, we know that conversation and relationship building within our communities of practice and our communities of interest is the key to all that we do. Sharing, storytelling, asking questions, and providing answers is our core mission.

But what are the best solutions for doing that?

That is a key question that Sue Hawkins, Project Coordinator for the Sustainable Ag Energy Community of Practice is asking of her colleagues on the Content Management Board and of the eXtension Staff. Where does she go to do that? Where’s the best place to share information and build community among the coordinators and leaders of our Communities of Practice. And it’s a question, that John McQueen, of the eOrganic Community of Practice and Karen Jeannette, of the Consumer Horticulture Community of Practice, have been asking too.

Help us crowd-source that answer. What do you think? What are the best tools, the best solutions, and the best strategies for sharing? What can the eXtension Initiative staff do to facilitate that sharing? What do our Communities of Practice need to do? What can we all do in Extension to make this better?

Would Get Satisfaction work as a forum? Is the CoP Network at Wet Paint the best place? What about Facebook? or Twitter? Would creating a community and a mailing list at people.extension.org work best?

Are there others? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments. Or head over to Get Satisfaction or Wet Paint – or start a new discussion in another tool (and let everyone know in the comments where that is).

We are very excited to announce major new features in the eXtension FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) application! This is the biggest change yet to eXtension FAQ and it includes a very powerful information management technology called Tagging. (read more about it in the feature list below.)

There are also helpful visual changes. The “Ask an Expert” tool (used to answer questions submitted from the eXtension public site) is now a standalone application that works side-by-side with the FAQ tool. The cleaner design makes the program much easier to use and addresses previously identified points of confusion.

The new site is going live Monday morning, November 5th. If you can’t wait until Monday, go visit the FAQ demo site and get a sneak peek. Feel free to play in there because the data is not live and questions and responses are not actually sent.

7 Brand New Features in the FAQ Application

Tagging
The revamped FAQ application offers a beefed-up system of information management called tagging that offers users enormous flexibility to find and organize their FAQs. Tagging allows users to construct their own personalized systems of information organization from the ground up. These systems become very valuable to the community as more and more tags are added.

Save for later
Save the question now, write the answer later. We now support a more flexible workflow for users who want to get FAQs into the system.

Ask an Expert
This feature is now a standalone tool inside the FAQ application. It’s easier to use and offers a new “area of expertise” and geography filter.

Convert any Incoming Question into a FAQ
We added tighter integration between Ask an Expert and FAQs. Any resolved incoming question can now be converted directly to a FAQ.

Search
We’ve added a faster more stable search. (But tags are so useful, you may find yourself using search less)

Cleaner Design
Individual FAQs and Incoming Questions both have improved layouts and navigation.

Reporting
Users can now custom select a date range when generating reports.

These are just a handful of the new features we’re introducing. There are many more all designed to make the FAQ application more powerful and easier to use. We hope you like the sneak peek and look forward to seeing you in the new system!

Yesterday, after two months of working on the redesign, we rolled out a completely new and rebuilt-from-the-ground-up About eXtension. The transition went smoothly (if you are reading this in a feed, you may not have even realized that there is a new site — come check it out!) so we hope you’ll come take advantage of the new site.

There’s a lot of underlying changes — better site organization and a cleaner, easier-to-read design — but the biggest difference is the homepage. The new homepage is designed to help first-time visitors quickly get up to speed with all eXtension has to offer. It also serves as an information hub for existing members to find everything they need.

Here are a few highlights of the new homepage design:

1. Global navigation bar: The top of every page contains links to all the main eXtension properties (the Wikis and our applications).
2. The Blog: Yes, we still have a blog — it’s just not our homepage anymore. You can read it at http://about.extension.org/blog or, even better, subscribe to the feed (links at the bottom of every page) and never miss a post.
3. Quicklinks: A consolidated list of popular eXtension web pages.
4. Upcoming Events: Easily check for Professional Development opportunities and other eXtension-related events. It pulls its information from blog posts that have been categorized as events.

We hope you enjoy the new site and would love to hear what you think. You can leave a comment right here on this post or email us at feedback@extension.org. Thanks!

We’re putting the final touches on the new About eXtension redesign and have launched a demo site for testing purposes. If you’d like to get a sneak peek of the redesign, please visit http://about.demo.extension.org.

A few things to note about the demo site:

• The blog entries are not up-to-date
• We are still filling in content for a few pages

If you run into any other problems (for example, if the design/layout doesn’t look right) please let us know. You can leave a comment right here on this post or email us at feedback@extension.org. thanks!

We are excited to announce that About eXtension is in the process of being completely redesigned. We’ve been working on the redesign for a while and are close to rolling it out. We’re hoping to do this in the next week or two, so we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what’s coming.

Most noticeably, the site has a new look. We’ve created a simpler homepage that will better introduce new visitors to eXtension. In addition to the visual redesign, we reorganized all existing content currently available. New sections such as ‘Get Benefits’, ‘Get Involved’, Get Started’ and ‘Tool Directories’ make it easier to find the information you need and help new and existing members leverage all the resources that eXtension has to offer. We’re looking forward to the new site. We hope you like it too. Thanks!

Tomorrow morning we are rolling out some new features for the eXtension Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) application (http://faq.extension.org/) to help users manage questions submitted from ‘Ask an Expert’ on the eXtension Public Site (http://www.extension.org/). The changes include the ability to opt-in to (or opt-out of) automatic question assignments as well as default email signatures for responding to questions. The User Preference page also got a little face-lift with the addition of tabbed navigation. The new features will be live Wednesday morning, July 18th. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Incoming Question Assignments
Previously, when a user defined their Areas of Expertise and Geographic Regions, the user was automatically assigned incoming questions that matched their selections. We’ve now separated those two actions. This way a user can indicate their expertise to their colleagues in the system and then decide how — or if — they would like to help with incoming questions. There are a number of ways that users can help field incoming questions, and these new options can be found on the Areas of Expertise preference tab in a box called “Be a Pillar of the Community”. We hope that users will opt-in to help handle incoming questions, but we understand that it’s nice to be able to turn it off every once in a while

Email Signature Preference

There is another new feature on the General Preferences tab called “‘Ask an Expert’ Email Signature”. This lets you set a default signature line that is automatically added to your response when answering an Incoming Question. This is just a default — you can always edit it on a per-question basis.

Your Profile Page

We also made it easier to get to your User Profile page. Simply click on your name at the top of the browser window.

And once you get to your User Profile page, you’ll notice that your Areas of Expertise are now links. You can click on any item to see a list view of all users who have selected that same area of expertise. This can be a great way to see who else shares your interests.

We hope that these changes make the FAQ application a little more useful and easier to use.