New Article Published: Transforming roles of agricultural extension agency...

In their recent article published in The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension, Dr Chowdhury and Dr Helen Hambly Odame raised several critiques on roles of agricultural extension agency in facilitating and strengthening agricultural innovation in Bangladesh. The authors concluded that the public-sector agency encountered several challenges in supporting innovation as a collective action that would satisfy needs of different stakeholders. The authors argue that there is a tendency of the extension agency to remain in a linear paradigm of information dissemination, and does not foresee extension methods (e.g. training, demonstration) as the facilitation of interactive learning and knowledge embedding processes. 

Based on these findings, we get some hints on how the public-sector extension agency would use the new ICT and social media for enabling innovation in Bangladesh.  In this particular case, this is plausible that extension agency (if get access to) would use social media to perform their traditional communication tasks, such as information dissemination. Nevertheless, this is an important question to ask, if we want to harness the power of new media for strengthening agricultural innovation. 
  
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Radio and Emerging ICTs

In a recent post by Dr Helen Hambly Odame on the blog Mobilizing Knowledge for Sustainable Agriculture she discusses the established strengths of traditional broadcast radio and the potential to add value to this medium using social media networks and platforms.

Follow the link to read her post: Developing the Concept and Practice of Radio+.

Connecting Locally Across the Web in Rural Manitoba

In rural Manitoba Eric Boisjoli and his team created a Facebook-like social media networking tool using community pages to connect those in rural areas to the events and organizations close to home. As reported on CBC when Boisjoli moved to Ile des Chênes, Manitoba he found it difficult to find out what was happening in his rural community. This lead him to create Community-info with the goal of solving this issue.

Community-info lets its users freely browse the site to find events that are happening in their respective communities. On Facebook and Twitter a user has to be a friend or follower of someone or an organization to hear about their events, but on Community-info the user can browse the events in their communities themselves.

A Knowledge Sharing Platform for Agricultural Water Management

Climate change, water scarcity, and food security are all contemporary issues whose negative effects are sensed at a global scale. Connecting those with shared interests on these topics to find solutions is becoming even more critical.

Agriwaterpedia is a website that functions as a knowledge sharing platform in an attempt to connect researchers, practitioners, students, and others. By using agricultural water management as the basis for conversation Agriwaterpedia also engages with larger concerns like climate change and food security.

Agriwaterpedia promotes freely accessible knowledge and collects articles on the topic of agricultural water management in its online library for all to use.

Using Social Media to Avoid Food Waste

Image source: http://goo.gl/ujVavO

Social media can be used to connect with others and broaden the conversation. According to this article a farm in the United States began using social media to avoid waste.

The idea arose after Nick Papadopoulos of Bloomfield Farms in California found he was repeatedly returning from markets with high quality unsold produce. After one weekend of being at the markets he began to promote what produce was left using Facebook and selling it at discounted prices. It turned out to be such a success that that Papadopoulos has created a blog-like website to connect with even more people called CropMobster.

With CropMobster many farmers and grocers can contribute and connect with small businesses or charities looking for less expensive good food.

Facebook is Getting the Conversation Going

Image source: http://goo.gl/2BDOVC

Facebook has recently announced that it will begin allowing its users to connect to broader conversations or trending topics using the hashtag, already in popular use on other social media platforms. An article in TechCrunch states that the hashtag on Facebook will involve capabilities such as “searching for hashtags, clicking on hashtags that come from other services, and writing posts directly from the hashtag feed”.

With the new hashtag feature introduced on Facebook its users may be able to use the social media site more like Twitter is used. On Twitter, using hashtags, you have the ability to begin conversations or even include yourself in conversations on topics far beyond your conventional social group. The result of this is, at the users discretion, they have a voice in either broad topics or niche topics where without the hashtag they would not have this option so easily available to them.