by Michelle Rodgers, MSUE associate director of operations
A few weeks ago eight Michigan State University Extension faculty members and educators attended Your Gateway to the Future of Cooperative eXtension. We’ve dubbed this group, the MSUE I Team. The “I” stands for institutional, and their job is to launch eXtension at MSUE.
Lela Vandenberg, Kathe Hale, Wayne Beyea, Liz Wells, Christine Skelly, Glenn Pape, Erica Tobe, Ruth Borger, Erica Ciupak and I came back excited about eXtension’s tools such as moodle, SecondLife, Flickr, Ask an Expert (AaE), Communities of Practice (CoP), social networking, widgets and knols.
If you have no idea what some of these terms mean, the team also learned that it is never too late learn. And the best way to do that is to get on board with eXtension. This welcoming community of colleagues is working to explore how we can use technology to meet the Extension mission. A 30-minute visit to the web site can introduce you to many of these tools. There are 42 Communities of Practice, to get involved in, and I encourage you to select one or two that are meaningful to you.
This week the MSUE eXtension institutional team met to develop a plan to integrate state participation in eXtension. Many ideas were shared and the group is currently using a wiki as a tool to work collectively on finalizing the planning process that began in our face to face meeting.
If you have used eXtension, we’d like to hear about your experience. Tell us about it in the comments section below. By networking in this way, we can help all of us get ideas of how we might be able to incorporate eXtension into our work. So go there to enter your experiences or to learn what your colleagues are doing!
If you missed the lunch and learn session about eXtension with Jerry Thomas from Ohio State, you can catch up by viewing the recorded session. And you can join the final session on Oct. 29 from noon to 1 p.m. by logging on to the Breeze site. (You’ll find all the log in information and phone numbers to call there.)
You can also explore eXtension on your own by visiting the eXtension main page.
11 Comments
October 29, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I am a part of the “MITT” group. (That stands for Managing in Tough Times.) I used information I found on this site in my spring FCS Newsletter. It was a themed issue featuring articles about stretching resources, finding ways to have fun as a family that don’t cost a lot and ways to save on household activities. This site was a great help in putting my newsletter together. You can find the newsletter on the Montcalm FCS page.
October 29, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I am the leader of the feedstocks team for the Sustainable Ag Energy Community of Practice. Our team is developing pages on bioenergy including ethanol, biodiesel, production practices, processing, energy conservation and biogas. Sign into eXtension, then go to http://cop.extension.org/wiki/Sustainable_Ag_Energy_Content. Let me know if you have any questions or would like to be part of the team.
October 30, 2009 at 9:12 am
Hi Guys,
I attended Molly Frendo’s lunch meeting on Moodle and have been playing a bit. During the discussion she mentioned Google.docs (sp?) is not appropriate because the documents get hosted on a server that is not owned by MSU and is out of our network. I understand if we use Moodle with eXtension, our data is not hosted on an MSU server and is outside of the MSU network. Aren’t we in risk with Copyright issues??? How are we getting around not hosting our data on a Non-MSU owned server? Thanks!!
November 2, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Ben,
Thanks for this question. MSU does have a cloud computing policy, which outlines some ground rules for using non-MSU owned servers, including Google Docs. The most important thing is that we read and understand any End User License Agreement (EULA) before putting MSU Intellectual Property (IP) in the “cloud”. Since this is an ever changing area, ANR Technology Services has been reviewing needs and requests to help determine what is safe and what is not. In Molly’s case, no MSU IP was being uploaded, so it is a very good use of Moodle. I (and others) will be reviewing the MSUE contract with eXtension to see how Moodle might work with our IP in the future. Please let me know if I can be of further help in clarifying.
November 2, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Thanks, Erica. We have our Nutrition Education 123 online course on Angel right now. Of course, with the possibility that MSU may move away from Angel, we were thinking of trying it out with Moodle. However, it contains a lot of MSUE developed documents and video presentations that we would want to only be on a secured server under MSU’s control. So, as you get a better idea of how this could be arranged, please keep me in the loop!
October 30, 2009 at 9:48 am
I just used eXtension in the last couple of weeks to look up information for some people who called for information that I could not find using the MSU Extension Portal “knowledge base”. One was a question on how long eggs gathered right from the chickens on his farm could be kept and since I was not sure whether this time was different from the times we teach when they are purchased at the store I used eXtension to find out. Another was a question on harvesting of sweet potatoes. I got excellent answers with additional helpful material from other Extension services. The service is very easy to use; it was easy to figure out where I needed to go and what I needed to do to get answers to my questions.
October 30, 2009 at 10:24 am
I needed to edit my comment: I used eXtension to give an inquirer information on whether some tomatoes with “spots” or perhaps blight could be safely canned as long as they were not “spoiled”. I believe the sweet potato question was answered by entering a general search on computer which brought up some extension sites in other states.
November 1, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Thanks, Linda. I’m glad that this has been positive and useful. It is my understanding that the Managing in Tough Times information is a collection of information from extension all over the country and is not necessarily peer reviewed but is available particularly to help internally educator to educator . Hopefully, this leads to other great resources you can use.
October 30, 2009 at 9:59 am
This comment has perhaps been stated by others. I have participated as an “expert” answering questions from the public. My biggest frustration is that the categories of expertise are too broad–I will answer questions about fruit, my area of expertise, but am not qualified to answer questions about growing herbs, cold frames, etc. If I am sent a question out of my field (which happens frequently), I supposedly have the obligation to find someone else who can. I suggest that “experts” be allowed to specify in detail with a one or two line description what categories of questions they will answer.
November 1, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Bill:
By chance, did you attend either of the eXtension adobe connect sessions last week. Jerry Thomas showed some details about ask the expert and how you can set it to further screen what questions you will answer. Jerry can be reached at Jerold Thomas [thomas.69@cfaes.osu.edu]
November 2, 2009 at 10:55 am
Thanks for the contact information for Jerry. The issue is that the areas of expertise topics are too broad for my specialty–I am suggesting via Jerry the addition of more subcategories.