Extension Stakeholder Engagement: Adapting to the Twenty-First Century

Over the past 100 years, a number of societal trends have influenced how Cooperative Extension engages public audiences in its outreach and education efforts. These trends include rapid evolution in communication technology, greater specialization of Land-Grant University faculty, and diversification of funding sources. In response, Extension organizations have adapted their engagement approach, incorporated new technologies, modified their organizational structures, and even expanded the notion of public stakeholders to include funders, program nonparticipants, and others. This article explores the implications for future Extension efforts using two case studies—one which explores how a community visioning program incorporated new ways of engaging local audiences, and another which explores how an Extension business retention program used participatory action research and educational organizing approaches to strengthen participation in a research-based program

AGENT: Alumni growth and engagement across new technologies

The AGENT project aims to use social networking technologies (LinkedIn and Facebook) to support the development of undergraduates’ employability and career development. The focus of the project is on e-mentoring by alumni to provide a ‘bridge’ between individuals whose social ties and connections are weakened by time and distance, whilst at the same time capitalising on the learning opportunities afforded by the widening of social networks. Social networking sites (SNSs) have been shown to provide students with the tools to make connections, build relationships and support personal development. From a social capital perspective, SNSs can support ‘weak ties’ by allowing students to grow a social network from which to draw resources in the form of information, knowledge, advice and expertise that an institution’s alumni can provide. Alumni are a key resource for building professional networking communities that can provide offline as well as online support to students. We report on an on-going JISC project –AGENT (Alumni Growth and Engagement across New Technologies) that explores how Web 2.0 technologies engage alumni, create the sense of belonging, develop more effective and mutually-beneficial alumni-student connections and associated positive social capital outcomes.Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) 2011-201

Role Assignment Adaptation: An Intentional Forgetting Approach

In organizations the distribution of tasks is a rising challenge in complex and dynamic environments. By structuring responsibilities and expectations for task processing in roles, organizations provide a transparent approach for collaboration. However, if tasks are being generated unexpectedly, actors who enact multiple roles might be overloaded in dynamic environments. By focusing on relevant information in terms of an intentional forgetting mechanism, actors could overcome these overload situations. Therefore, we provide an agent-based simulation to model and analyze effects of intentional forgetting by adapting role assignments in dynamic environments. The agent architecture utilizes separated revision functions to control an agent’s perception and belief acquisition to focus on relevant information. The model is tested using a case-study in a simulated emergency response scenario. The simulation results show that adapting role assignments at runtime improves team performance significantly