Abstract

Media summary

Keywords

Introduction

Queensland grain growers have for decades enjoyed access to a wealth of government-produced information on growing grain, from farm management to planting, protecting, harvesting and marketing the crop. In this context, grain production and crop management information has long been recognised as one of the cornerstones of grains extension. Historically, this information has been delivered in hardcopy – in books, booklets, brochures or single-page fact sheets – and distributed widely but in an often ad hoc way. In the late 1990s, the spectacular growth and influence of the world wide web dictated that Queensland’s Department of Primary Industries (DPI) should make an effort to provide grain (and other) information on its web page. With the benefit of hindsight, it would be fair to say that in the early years of DPI’s web development a certain fascination with web technologies was evident and that posting client-focused information onto the web page may have taken second place to seeing what the web could do and how it could do it.

Today, the focus of delivering online information to clients has swung to a needs-centred model and web authors are becoming more aware of their responsibilities in providing clearly written, easily navigable web content that also allows for a degree of interactivity between the client and the organisation. Web authors need to be cognisant that transmission technology in remote agricultural regions is often inadequate and that responses to enquiries are now expected to be delivered quickly and completely, reflecting contemporary commercial benchmarks in service provision. Furthermore, web authors need to recognise that a perceived decline in personalised extension services in many regional areas of Queensland needs to be levered with online information that is better, more accurate and more up-to-date than the hardcopy information that was available a decade ago.

In light of these developments, extension officers with Queensland DPI’s farming systems group set about the task of redesigning a web site intended for use by graingrowers and grain industry representatives in the northern cropping zone of Australia. They undertook the task at the end of 2001 and were ‘finished’ by the middle of 2002, but of course no online presence is ever ‘finished’ and the same officers are still responsible for maintaining the technical accuracy of the current pages, adding new pages as they are written and proposing significant restructure of the site in light of evaluation data. They faced a number of challenges in undertaking to redesign a grains information website:

• What do clients expect from a contemporary grains website and how are these expectations to be identified and addressed?
• How could a new grains website complement (or compete with) existing extension resources such as books, brochures or workshop programs?
• How can a grains website incorporate established extension principles and practice to be even more effective and provide best value to clients?

An ‘X-factor’ challenge has also emerged: how do long-established organisations like Queensland’s DPI adapt to meet the demands of what amounts to a completely different way of doing ‘extension business’? The transition to providing grains information (or any other agricultural information) online for the benefit of clients is also taking place in an extremely dynamic environment in which commercial outfits are increasingly valuing information in very commercial terms. Agricultural information is no longer solely sourced from the government and ‘distribution’ is less important than ‘access’. Extension, as understood in the time-honoured way, may still be recognisable in 2003 but the information resources that support extension activities are undergoing a seismic transformation (King and Boehlje 2000).

Background

Clients of grains information in Queensland have historically relied on state-produced information to help them make crop management decisions. Until the late 1980s, this information had been published as a series of fact sheets dealing with specific topics related to grains production. Around this time, both government extension officers and individual growers recognised that the number and scope of single page fact sheets being generated in response to client demand had grown considerably, and the idea of combining the sheets into a book was realised. ‘Crop Management Notes’ books – each around 200-300 pages long – were published every two or three years in several crop ‘zones’ around Queensland. They contained information about crop management principles as well as updated information on new plant varieties and chemical registrations. Subsequent evaluation of these books was conducted throughout the 1980s and showed that clients regarded the books favourably (Crosthwaite and Vance, 1989). Some evaluations revealed that grain growers generally appreciated having an information resource that was contained in the one volume that was easy to navigate (that is, find the appropriate information). Most farmers indicated they mostly used ‘ready reckoner’-type information - relating to tactical decision making such as pest control (Lawrence et al, 1994, p20).

In the 1990s, ‘Crop Management Notes’ books, conventionally printed in black and white to contain costs, were supplemented by a series of full-colour brochures and booklets that dealt with special interest topics or problems that required diagnostic photographs. The ‘new generation’ series of information resources, marketed as CropLink, was an attempt to contemporise government grains information services by improving production quality, getting a better idea of who was using the information, and tying information resources much more closely to existing or planned extension activities such as TOPCROP. In effect, government-produced information was seen to be increasingly competing with information distributed by agribusinesses which was (and increasingly still is) slickly produced and distributed more or less accurately to defined market segments. As such, CropLink was launched as a subscriber-only service, semi-commercial in nature, that promised to keep clients up-to-date with relevant and accurate information that was easy to navigate and attractively presented (Bowman 1999).

Print history

The background above serves to underline the fact that DPI’s farming systems group, which had produced and distributed this extensive body of grains-related information for over a decade or more, has a very solid tradition of producing printed materials and a culture of using hardcopy information as a cornerstone of its extension service. For many grains industry extension officers in Queensland, hardcopy resources have been used as a point of reference with clients with phone enquiries solved with “It’s on page 92 of your Crop Management Notes” or meetings and workshops backed up with one page reference sheets packed with take-home messages. A culture has also emerged that has resulted in highly developed levels of ownership over hardcopy resources like Crop Management Notes and a sense that ‘our’ information is somewhat oracle-like in terms of its ubiquity, relevance and worth to traditional clients.

The emergence of the world wide web (WWW) as a potent tool for storing and distributing information forced a re-conceptualisation of government-produced information services from the middle of the 1990s that is still continuing today. For the DPI’s farming systems group, the WWW was initially framed as merely another platform on which to store grains information: a live ‘book’ that never needed to be printed. It has since been realised, of course, that the web – for all of its real-time capabilities and ability to reach into the household or business like no other technology – also requires on-going maintenance, a commitment of resources and as much attention to detail as any large publication. For large, complex and interactive websites, the resource demands are often higher than for printed resources. The realisation of the web’s demand on resources has extended to the point that DPI’s farming systems group has undertaken to divert approximately 90% of its publishing energy into the online environment.

But another – possibly unforeseen – result of the rise of the WWW as an information service platform relates to how agricultural organisations like the DPI view extension as a component in the RD&E schema. Print resources are expensive to produce, distribute and store, but they are highly visible outputs of extension ‘effort’. A book may be launched, lauded and lobbed on the table for all to peruse, and the time and energy spent by extension officers in producing the resource is measurable and conspicuous. A web site, however, is published and updated silently with little fanfare lending illusion to the amount of work required to make it happen. The only real cost, from an administrative point of view, appears to be officers’ time (conventionally undervalued in the public sphere). Nevertheless, despite this ‘silence’ there is broad-ranging and detailed information to be found on websites like those hosted by DPI’s farming systems group. Crop management information – compiled by dozens of extension officers over the years – is there on the web to be accessed and on first reading would seem to satisfy many of the demands of the ‘E’ in RD&E. Again from an administration point of view, information of the type normally used and traded by extension officers has now been made more public with less apparent cost. The challenge for the website re-design team – extension officers all – was to deliver a relevant and easily navigable grains information website whilst remaining critical of an apparent drift toward framing the website as a replacement for, rather than a tool of, conventional extension activities.

Problem statement

Three DPI farming systems staff were given the brief to redesign the organisation’s web site. The existing site had been a hastily agglomerated collection of pages that could be, at best, navigated by luck. The site was poorly designed, information was often duplicated or triplicated and there was no deliberate or intuitive means of leading clients from one page to another relevant page. Many of the pages themselves were simply carbon copies of previously printed fact sheets. However, in favour of the site’s redesign was the fact that the wider DPI page was administered centrally by a committed web strategy team and department-wide web publishing software – tailored specifically to the needs of the Queensland DPI – was in place. The three-person team also had access to a wealth of previously published crop management information which could be re-organised into a web-friendly hierarchy as well as access to information about the most in-demand cropping information from the DPI’s Call Centre, which keeps meticulous logs of all client enquiries.

In summary, DPI’s farming systems group required an easily navigable web page that carried crop management information relevant to traditional clients.

Assumptions about the project

The re-design team needed to make several assumptions about the nature of their task before they could meaningfully undertake any activity.

• First, it was assumed that a new-look grains information web site might go some way to make printed resources redundant, but it could not stand in the place of conventional extension as it is widely understood. That is to say that the new site might replace books, but it could not conceivably act as a surrogate for human relationships, human enquiries or human learning. Rather, the web site might act as a resource for extension activities.
• Second, it was assumed that the ‘project’ needed to be framed as a program, given the on-going maintenance required to make any website fresh and relevant in the minds of its clients. Ultimately, this assumption was made necessary because DPI’s Web Strategies group sends automated messages to page authors at least every six months to ensure information is current and relevant.
• Third, it was assumed that although transmission lines in rural and remote Queensland (and interstate) are still barely adequate to transmit large parcels of information, and that this had suppressed the take-up of information and communication technologies (ICT) in these areas, this would improve over the next five years or so and that DPI’s farming systems group would be in a better position to deliver extension support information if it took steps now to design an intuitive and modular framework for its online information.
• Fourth, and related to the assumption above, it was assumed that in the absence of a quality government-sponsored grains information site, other commercial or semi-commercial sites would colonise the market place and make it more difficult for the DPI site to be established as a credible or reliable resource. Primary producer clients are time poor and will not spend evenings searching for information on unfamiliar websites.
• Last, it was assumed that grain growers would be most interested in ‘ready reckoner’ information that related to seeding rates, pesticide information, available varieties and similar ‘entry level’ information. This assumption was backed up by market information gleaned from the DPI’s Call Centre, and the design of the grains site would necessarily reflect clients’ highest-demand information needs.

Theory and literature

A host of websites and, to a lesser extent, texts deal exclusively with designing a ‘good’ website. The message is usually consistent: ensure content is relevant and up-to-date, understand the purpose of the site, make navigation easy and don’t clutter the site with needless graphics and distractions. Among the best known web-based authors of these guidelines is Jakob Nielsen, whose "Alertbox" receives nearly 10 million hits annually. This website deals at length with Nielsen’s conclusions – drawn from extensive testing – about website ‘usability’, a term which incorporates all of the elements that go to make a site user-friendly.

But there is little in the literature to suggest that any significant research has been carried out to determine what makes a ‘good’ website for primary producers, less still on how websites of this sort could be used as extension resources. Internationally, periodicals such as the Journal of Extension (itself an online journal) regularly feature one or more articles on farmers’ use of the internet, one of the latest examples from Radhakrishna et al (2003) arguing that “extension educators should willingly progress by adopting efficient technologies, but they should not abandon more traditional methods until it is warranted by lack of demand”. Overall, these articles mostly suggest that farmers’ use of the internet is increasing but rarely point to how this trend could or should be strategically incorporated into extension planning.

Locally, Alexander et al (1997) investigated how ICTs could be exploited in a learning context and Bryant (1997) looked at computer usage on Australian farms. More specific to the grains industry, the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) conducted market research in 1999 to finetune their communication strategy. At that time, 91% of surveyed graingrowers who already had an internet connection indicated they would like to see local and other GRDC-funded research results published to a web page. The study also revealed that (at that time) 10% of grain growers used the internet for grain research. It is safe to assume that percentage has since risen.

Groves and Da Rin (1999) authored an RIRDC short report that researched computer and internet use levels amongst Australian grain growers. Their research points out that the "supply" end of the internet value chain (agriculturally-focused web publishers) affects the nature of the "demand" end (farmers), in summary arguing that farmers will not use the internet if products and services designed for them are not relevant. They state that "most of the organisations serving Australian agriculture have not been able to keep up with the new opportunities", listing content, commerce, education and training, and economic and social development as some of the obvious prospects for web-based publishing. From a content perspective, the RIRDC research found there was "a significant proportion of farmers who consider that there are unacceptably wide gaps, particularly in market and price information, technical information and local/regional information" and from a marketing point of view that "few (organisations) have conducted research into users’ needs – some do not monitor the usage of their site at all". The RIRDC research provided good reasons to think critically about redesigning the DPI’s grains information website and, through solid extension and market research, establish ways and means of incorporating clients’ needs into the redesign.

Overall, though, the convergence of extension traditions and emerging web-based technologies is still happening, and a ‘theory’ about how the two might complement each other is yet to emerge. As with all things web-related, the environment is extremely dynamic and usability ‘findings’ are outdated very quickly. King and Boehlje (2000), however explored some ways in which modern extension was being challenged and these threats may hold some clues about how the ITC-extension complex may evolve. Among their threats to traditional extension:

• Information, formerly freely traded, now has real commercial value and generates revenue
• ‘Extension’ is no longer a sole source of information
• The locus has shifted from ‘distribution technologies’ (print focus) to ‘access technologies’ (web focus)
• Rich interaction on the web, coupled with its phenomenal reach, gives online extension a potential advantage over traditional extension
• Individualised navigation services (making sense of vast quantities of information) has long been a key extension skill but it is one that is being increasingly automated (witness Google).

King and Boehlje go on to claim that on the face of evidence that extension has been slow to respond to the above threats, “anyone assuming they will be working in extension in the same way they do today beyond the next 5 to 10 years is just not paying attention”. It’s a sobering claim but one that adds spice to the challenge of incorporating extension principles into the design of a brand new grains information website.

The activity

So what happened during the redesign? The three DPI officers assigned the redesign job are geographically dispersed, so planning began at a rare face-to-face meeting. At this meeting, the team discussed

• assumptions about the project (discussed above),
• the market for online grains information (adapted from Call Centre market information),
• ‘future-proofing’ the website to ensure continued relevance, and finally
• the usual project-based logistics such as time, resources and personnel.

Significantly for a web-based project, the team also committed itself to find a way to maintain a team environment across a distance of 2000 kilometres through regular teleconferencing and email.

Extension resource or bare bones information?

Initially, the plan was to look closely at existing extension projects and programs in the grains industry in Queensland and to somehow match the structure and depth of the grains information page to them. After a scan of all Queensland Government-based grains extension projects, however, the team realised that many already had their communication channels established and operational (newsletters, field days, scheduled media and so on) and that setting up a ‘parallel media’ on the web would be either counter-productive or superfluous; in the words of one grains extension officer: “Probably quite useful if we spend time on it, but that’s not really appropriate at this stage of the project” (Lucy 2002). After listening to advice from various extension project leaders, the team instead embarked on a process of re-writing existing written materials (drawn from Crop Management Notes books, one-off brochures and other monographs) and organising them in such a way that they could be easily navigated and read on an online environment. These materials had already proven their worth both as extension resources and as in-demand client information.

The next logical step was to gather together all of the existing web pages, electronic files and other digital resources (often collectively known as ‘assets’) to determine the scope and depth of the information for which the team might be ultimately responsible. This in itself was an enormous task: the print tradition discussed above had resulted in many similar assets being ‘regionalised’ according to where a brochure or book had been published. For example, there were four versions of a book chapter called ‘Insect control in sorghum’ for the Darling Downs, Western Downs, the South Burnett, and Central Queensland. Each version was roughly the same but had been tweaked over the years to reflect regional variances, varying levels of technical expertise and even different authors’ writing styles. This level of duplication had been repeated across a wide range of topics and could not be supported in any meaningful way in a web environment.

Making a map of the territory

Once the full gamut of assets had been gathered and itemised, the team looked for ways in which they could be organised with a view to having all information easily navigable in a web environment. On the face of it, the existing information could be split into two camps:

1. basic crop management information that might be sought the night before an operation such as planting or spraying, and

2. crop management principles that might form a body of background data and research that clients might use to inform farm-level decisions, for example precision farming or organics.

A third camp, which is yet to be completed, would contain research and development reports and information and which would be written in a more scientific style. But regardless of the information ‘clumping’ discussed above, the principle that ultimately guided this stage of the work emerged out of data from DPI’s Call Centre, which has logged thousands of calls from primary producers all over Australia and keeps careful records of the questions asked and responses given. This extremely valuable market data suggested that it was the basic ‘ready-reckoner’ crop management information that was most in demand (Camp 1 above) and the team subsequently set about making that type of information the focus of the DPI broadacre field crops web page.

One of the major challenges that faced the team was somehow organising what amounted to thousands of printed pages of text into a schema that could viewed on a single computer screen. Taking heart from a comment from one of the DPI’s Web Strategies staff – “You will never get the hierarchy right … nobody does” (Sharp, 2001), the team set about trying to impose the most efficient ‘framework’ possible over the mass of assets it had collected but not worrying too much if some assets ‘fell through the cracks’.

The team came up with a schema that manifested itself in a front page that looked like this:

Fig 1: Front page of the broadacre field crops web site developed by Queensland DPI’s farming systems group

Ultimately, clicking on any of the links in the left-hand column [“Crop Information”] provides access to the equivalent of thousands of pages of printed text. Virtually all of DPI’s old grains-related information from a dozen or so books and from hundreds of fact sheets was distilled into that one column. The ready-reckoner information was organised by crop type, listed alphabetically, with planning-type information listed under “Crop Management Principles”.

Clicking on each crop hyperlink leads to another page with related links, the most prominent one called “A guide to XYZ production in Queensland”. Thus, clicking on Maize, for example, leads to this page:

Figure 2: Example of what the browser sees when they click on a ‘crop’ hyperlink. This example is maize. Under the “A guide to XYZ production in Queensland” link is a list of other pages that are not strictly ‘ready-reckoner’ information but are nevertheless judged likely to be relevant to the browser (in this case, armyworm plagues were threatening Queensland maize crops in early 2003).

Clicking on “A guide to XYZ production in Queensland” drops the visitor onto a mini-homepage that looks structurally the same regardless of the crop that was selected. Furthermore, information on each crop is accessed through the same subheadings, which are always in the same order:

Key points	Disease management
Marketing	Insect management
Varieties	Irrigation
Planting information	Harvesting
Fertiliser	Drying/handling/curing
Weed management	Yield

Does the map make sense?

Navigation was the principle that drove the website redesign in this way, backed up by the team’s commitment to making a very content-heavy site easy to ‘see’ at a glance (Fig 1) and consistently familiar as the client moved from page to page. The team agreed that visual and schematic consistency was important for farmer clients who may have had limited experience in web surfing or who needed to feel confident that they would not get ‘lost’ moving backwards and forwards through the expanse of grains-related information.

The team endeavoured as much as possible to enable clients to need a maximum of four mouse clicks to get to the information they needed. This often proved exceedingly difficult, particularly when ‘obscure’ problems like, for example, armyworm infestations – normally included in a general insect pests page for a particular crop – achieved quick notoriety during plague infestations and needed to be brought within one or two clicks of the curious client, rather than buried down with the non-plaguing insects.

Reorganising the website using mainly a crop-by-crop schema swallowed about 80 percent of the existing information that had been either orphaned, still in the print realm or otherwise not linked intuitively to any other page. Because it was modular, it also allowed for new information or even new crops to be added easily without disturbing the overall framework or confusing clients who are regular visitors. The remaining information – largely planning-level in its breadth and scope – was organised onto another page, the ‘Crop Management Principles’ page, which looks like this:

Figure 3: The Crop Management Principles page which links to information pitched at the planning level, rather than the ready-reckoner level, of grain farming operations

The redesigned website was demonstrated to managers who approved the work and allowed the team to get on with the job of evaluating the effectiveness of the new site with the intended clients (see discussion below).

Discussion

The preceding section on the ‘activity’ of redesigning a website for DPI’s grain grower clients and the wider grain industry probably places undue emphasis on the action phase of this project, implying that this constituted most of the energy given to the project. Though this phase of the project was indeed very busy, it mainly required base level organising and writing skills. The real intellectual investment in the project was made before a keystroke was made in the planning phase and it occurs now in the form of constant evaluation and updating of the website itself. In parallel with most extension projects, it is the planning, evaluation and reflection phases of this project that have generated the most useful insights into how the task could be done better and how the future alignment of web technology and extension practice might proceed.

Extension and the web

It has already been mentioned in this paper that during the planning phase the redesign team had sought wherever possible to align the new grains information website with existing grains-related extension activities or at least along extension lines. In practice, this was difficult to do. Extension, at least in the Queensland DPI, has a certain institutional inertia attached to it and for many existing projects the offer of a web presence represented another way of doing extension (with attendant extra labour demands) rather than a better way of doing extension. This is understandable, and reflected in the findings of a recent strategic review of web-based extension and learning in the dairy industry (Murphy 2002). Specifically, Murphy found that

most information providers’ expectations of using the Web for extension have not been met. The Web is acknowledged as an important source of information, however its effectiveness alone in changing behaviours, or assisting farmers to make better decisions, at present, is limited (p2).

It would appear that a similar belief pervades Queensland DPI’s farming systems group, although since the redesigned website has been online, interest in posting more information to the site has been growing. There are not, however, widespread calls for more innovative or interactive services to be provided to meet extension or R&D objectives.

Size does matter

The size of organisations like Queensland’s DPI can also make it difficult to change its web capacity quickly. Although the DPI is large enough to justify hosting a specialist group of web caretakers and strategists, this group relies on help from many regional officers to ensure content is current, relevant and accurate. Amongst these far-flung officers, there is no formal communication about web strategy or any convenient way of working together to produce a mutually planned web presence (although the technology certainly allows for this). Like many organisations of DPI’s size, various sub-organisations compete for attention and resources and over time develop their own peculiar cultures for gathering, writing and publishing web material for clients.

This is counter-productive, of course, in terms of maximising the potential of the web to reach clients and ultimately deliver extension services. Improvements to information integrity and delivery are made only incrementally; the web, however, is far from forgiving when it comes to slow movers and the Queensland DPI – like any other large government department – is now competing with a multitude of web-based information providers with relatively large budgets for marketing and communication. Marketing and communication have not been considered core business for many government departments until very recently, and so the lag in getting corporate messages – along with credible and useful client information – published online is considerable.

It might not be the size of the organisation, but the size of the website that counts most. DPI’s grains information website is very extensive, though ‘mapped’ well, yet it is not clear that clients actually need that breadth of information (Starasts 2003). A large online information ‘empire’ – regardless of the transparency of its navigation – may confuse, rather than connect with, visitors. Websites preoccupied with distributing information (organisation focus), rather than allowing access to information (client focus) might ultimately be doing their clients a disservice. DPI’s grains information site, for example, metaphorically invites visitors into a large, albeit well-signposted, library and wishes them “good luck” in their search. This is not to be over-critical of the DPI website, which has its evident strengths, but it highlights the fact the government agricultural departments have historically attempted to provide plenty of information – an oversupply in some cases – on a range of topics. By contrast, web clients want to find the specific ‘bit’ of information they are chasing, then get back to whatever else they were doing. That is to say, they want quick and easy access to the answer to their problem, not exposure to screens of data which may or may not help them straight away.

‘Ghosts’ in the extension corridor

Organisations such as Queensland’s DPI can be justifiably proud of their extension tradition in having guided primary production through the post-war boom in agriculture that witnessed the mechanisation of farming, the green revolution and other significant developments in recent decades. However, previous extension successes should not be an impediment to finding new ways or platforms to communicate change, whether these are web-based or otherwise. A host of models, borrowed and sometimes corrupted from both the natural and social sciences, have been used to inform extension theories and practices in the past (Schmidt 2001). These include technology transfer, diffusion of innovations, systems and participative models. A coherent ‘theory’ of web-based extension is yet to emerge, but it is important that conventional extension thinking does not unnecessarily retard the creative input that will be needed to carve out extension’s niche in the online world.

For example, one of the traditional strengths of extension is that it is usually a de-centralised profession operating best where it is needed and moulding itself to local conditions. Sympathy, boldness, criticism or support are called on depending on the immediate social or economic environment but intellectual resources can at any time be imported or supplemented from larger centres or even internationally if necessary. This makes extension a powerful agent for change and change management. It is difficult to conceive of how the web could incorporate this strength or make those sorts of human-level judgements, but on the other hand it would be short-sighted of the extension profession to ignore the web because of these shortcomings (Fell 2000).

Similarly, the long tradition of print resources that have backed up Queensland grains extension officers in the past has left an indelible imprint on the current extension culture to the point where much energy is now devoted to what’s commonly known as ‘version management’, the task of keeping track of different versions of the same document either through time (updates) or across platforms (hardcopy versus compact disc versus web). Print resources still appear to hold the throne, perhaps because of their tactile presence, the rewards that are received when they are distributed to clients, or the fact that there’s a print history and therefore a familiarity with what print resources can or cannot be expected to achieve in an extension environment.

Evaluation

Evaluation is traditionally one of extension’s weak points (Quinn Patton 1993), yet software is widely available to help web caretakers amass all sorts of visitation statistics to show which parts of their website are popular, which are not, where visitors came from and much more. In the case of the DPI grains information site, for example, it is now obvious from the visitation data that visitors are frequently from overseas, that enquiries tend to be quite seasonal, and that information about commercial plant varieties is in heavy demand. By themselves, these data can be used to tailor the content carried on the website or perhaps redesign the navigation or structure to ensure that the most in-demand information is the easiest to find. It would be even more useful, however, to use the data to intelligently inform extension programs based on measured and expressed demand. A high demand for crop variety information on the web, for example, might justify printing and distributing a document that carries salient comparative data from different varieties or organising a ‘roadshow’-style workshop to discuss each variety’s relative merits with clients.

Regardless of the value of this web-derived market data, it is very difficult to discern what visitors do with the information once they leave the site. It is very easy, however, to make any particular website the focus of an evaluation workshop and contrive to sit clients in front of a computer to either explore the site at their own pace or set standard questions or research problems for them to solve. An exercise just like this was conducted as an initial evaluation of the redesigned DPI grains information site, and although ‘bait’ was required to get farmers to attend (free lunch and book vouchers) it turned out that most of the farmers present had been only dimly aware that such a grains site even existed and appreciated the opportunity to explore it in depth. Their criticisms of the site proved very valuable to the organisers of the workshop and similar ongoing evaluation sessions are now planned to ensure the grains information website stays relevant in the minds of clients. This is ‘proper’ extension, with a sense of community, place and progress but the focus is clearly on the web: on what it can do, what it cannot, and how it might play a role in clients’ decision-making now and into the future.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges, it seems sensible to spend some energy on exploring ways in which the web can complement extension for two co-determining reasons:

1. the web will not go away and its ability to carry rich information to burgeoning numbers of people (clients) grows annually, and

2. extension can no longer claim exclusivity (if it ever did) in the fields of adult education, providing rural/agricultural information, or community development.

How, then, can extension professionals exploit the best of the web without reverting to the role of mere supervisors of data warehouses?

Speed

One way is to use the best features of the web – speed, reach, and intelligent linking – to claim a place for extension and to value-add to existing or proposed extension services. Market feedback on the grains information website in Queensland, coupled with DPI Call Centre data, indicates that topics that are expected to change annually or more frequently, for example newly available commercial plant varieties, are most often visited by clients. The web site, then, should feature this sort of high-demand information prominently and with as much razzle-dazzle as modesty will allow as soon as it is available. Web-based information can be republished overnight, quicker by far than any slick brochure, ensuring that clients have access to the most up-to-date information available. It would be a simple planning matter to dovetail, say, a district extension meeting with the launch of a new varieties page on the web so that participants could see for themselves what sort of information is available online.

Reach

District extension meetings, however, can only hope to attract the slimmest fraction of the potential client market for new information so the web’s reach can be exploited to ‘talk’ to many more clients than was previously possible with conventional extension. Many organisations now host electronic newsletters which keep clients abreast of new developments, offers, sales and news and these have a habit of finding their own subscriber list as clients email subscription information to their peers. Good e-newsletters will link back to the host’s website wherever relevant which – provided the organisation’s online presence is based on quality – builds long term credibility and loyalty. This information can reach clients in a way that traditional extension would struggle to do, but there is nothing stopping any extension organisation from promoting activities, events or services in their own e-newsletters.

Intelligent linking

The right links in the right places can help websites truly become a one-stop shopping experience for information. For clients, links can also represent or suggest strategic alliances between the host and other kindred organisations. Linking, for example, to the relevant federal or industry body in the appropriate place in a website means less work and less frustration for the client. In effect, this is what many extension professionals have been doing for decades: navigating and filtering information on behalf of clients. The web does it more quickly and more thoroughly, so the extension profession needs to find ways to move out of its old role and into something more engaging and more relevant to its clients. Providing intelligent, relevant and timely links to strategically aligned organisations for the benefit of clients might be a more appropriate role.

The above key strategic advantages of the web, whilst potentially exploitable now by extension practitioners, are only the beginning. Facilities such as video streaming, broadband access, superior search engines and more are emerging now or are commonly in use already. Is a virtual field day, attended by thousands of primary producers and others from around the country (none of whom leave their lounge room) too difficult to imagine? It shouldn’t be. Nothing the web currently does can replace traditional face-to-face communication in an extension environment, but that should never prevent extension professionals from using every tool in their kit to help keep the profession moving through the 21^st century.

References

Alexander, S., McKenzie, J. et al. (1997). An evaluation of information technology projects for University learning. University of Technology Sydney.

Bowman, R. (1999). Marketing strategies for ‘CropLink’. Report included in REC compendium From the field: extension in practice (vol 4).

Bryant, L. (1999). Computers on the farm: farmers’ usage patterns and impact on farm management. RIRDC: Canberra.

Collins, R. An evaluation of the Central Queensland Crop Management Notes. Unpublished DPI Report.

Crosthwaite, I. and Vance, P. (1989). Evaluation of South Burnett Crop Management Notes. DPI Project Report QO90001.

Fell, R. L. (2000). Time to converse: the importance of language, conversation and electronic media in agricultural extension. Australian Journal of Experimental agriculture, 40, pp 503-509.

GRDC Grains Research Industry Survey Wave 8 (1999). GRDC Report: TQA Research Pty Ltd.

Groves, J. and Da Rin, J. (1999) Farmers and the Internet. RIRDC Short Report No 58. http://www.rirdc.gov.au/pub/shortreps/sr58.htm

King, D.A., and Boehlje, M.D. (2000). Extension: On the brink of extinction or distinction? Journal of Extension, 38(5).

Lawrence, D.N., Blackett, D.S., McCollum, D., Salmond, G., Cawley, S.T., and French, A.V. (1994). An evaluation of the DPI Crop Management Notes on the Western Downs and Maranoa. DPI Project Report Q094001.

Lucy, M. (2002). DPI senior extension officer, Pers. Comm.

Murphy, C. (2002). Strategic Review of web-based extension and learning in the Australian dairy industry. Report for the Australian Dairy Research and Development Corporation.

Nielsen, J. Alertbox: Jakob Nielsen's Column on Web Usability at www.useit.com/alertbox/

Quinn Patton, M. (1993). World trends and challenges in extension. Paper presented to the 1st APEN conference, Gold Coast, Australia 1993.

Radhakrishna, R.B., Nelson, L., Franklin, R. and Kessler, G. (2003) Information Sources and Extension Delivery Methods Used by Private Longleaf Pine Landowners. Journal of Extension 41(4). www.joe.org

Schmidt, D. (2001). Information in extension: A poverty of theory. Paper presented to the APEN 2001 International Conference, Toowoomba, Australia, October 2001.

Sharp, R. (2001). DPI Web Strategies officer, Pers. Comm.

Starasts, A. (2003). How Traditional Dimensions of Communication and Information Seeking are translated into Online Information Seeking - Enhancing Farming Systems Learning Opportunities through Information Technology. Paper presented at 1^st Australian Farming Systems Association conference, Toowoomba, September 2003.