Investing in High-Speed Broadband in Rural Ontario

Social media and social networks require investment in infrastructure to accommodate growth in communication and education. In rural Ontario having access to high speed broadband networks will boost social connectivity between the small towns that populate rural areas and the global population beyond. At the moment, as Serge Lavoie writes on the Rural Ontario Institute’s blog, Ontario is lacking in investment in broadband networks that would potentially reverse the population drain currently happening in rural communities. 

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Finland and Vodacom Tanzania Partner to Help Farmers

Allowing farmers to be able to access information through mobile phone use has become more important in a globalized economy. In Tanzinia the Finnish government, Finnish company Sibesonke, and mobile service provider Vodacom Tanzania have come together to help farmers access information through the use of their mobile phones. The Head of Brand and Communication at Vodacom Tanzania, Kelvin Twissa, explained that his company is always trying to find new ways to benefit its customers while Sibesonke CEO Uwe Schwarz described the partnership as a major step towards implementing their life-improving technology using social media and mobile phones in developing countries.Sibesonke is a spin-off of Nokia and created technology that allows interactive social networks to be used with inexpensive phones.

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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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6 Guidelines for Better Development Outcomes Using Social Media

Image source: Afrographique.

As more people in rural communities and developing countries continue to come online the option to communicate through social media becomes increasingly more viable. The dynamic and non-hierarchical properties of communication through social media tools contrasts heavily with the more traditional forms of radio and television making its use a popular choice in many contexts across the world.

If the power of social media lies in its ability to democratize communication how can you implement social media strategies to strengthen this quality?

On ICTworks Wayan Vota offers 6 guidelines for developing and implementing social media strategies.