Skill Learning Opportunities in Nepal

4^th May 2013

An event  " Skill Learning Opportunities" was organized with an aim to boost up the knowledge in ICT for agriculture of Agriculture students of IAAS, Paklihawa Campus. This one-day program was called by Amnesty Inernational, Paklihawa youth  network in collaboration with YPARD, Youth for Conservation and Sustainable Agriculture (YCSA) and Youth Endeavour for Sustainable Agriculture (YES Agriculture), local NGOs, and Broadlink as online partner,  in presence of Mr. Dinesh Pandey as a mentor.

The program was conducted to meet the demand of students on precise internet browsing, technical and online information about grants, proposals and conferences related to agriculture, how to use social media and linking them for their better use for the purpose of communication and extension, blogging and its content management and information about e-mail handling.

The whole session was online with some presentation and knowledge sharing being offline. There were 40 participants actively participating in the event with the zeal for better use of available internet in the field of agriculture and extension for the dissemination of the knowledge gained. We were taught by our mentor from the bottom line teaching us the function of different short cut keys used in web handling. It then follows the session of technical knowledge sharing where we got to know the information and technique about search engine for precise, accurate and appropriate search of the key word in no time without any hassle. Likely we were taught to use Google scholar, Google image etc for the search of genuine articles and images.

Being an agriculture students we need to be updated for every opportunities of conferences, call for papers, events, workshops and seminars, likewise training as well. For this we need to use the internet  precisely, so we were skilled for effective search for different opportunities whose deadline has not been expired, likely we came to know different blogs and web pages related to agriculture, we do signup on them during the online session that then allows us to have regular newsletter and information about opportunities.

Social media is most widely used and most preferable means of communication. Various social media, blogs, websites and web portals are there which are easily accessible. Few of them are Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIN etc. They are easy to use and is readily understandable. It can be best utilized for the means of agricultural extension. These different media were discussed on behalf of their pros. Moreover, Mr. Panday made us easy understanding on how to use Twitter.

For effective communication, presentation is needed and PowerPoint presentation is best used for this purpose. We were skilled by our mentor to make presentation using the screen shot slide that makes us feel everything is going online though we are presenting being offline. It was fun learning.

Later session was about blogging and its content management. We learnt signing up for blog then we were taught for the management of content and knowledge on how to share the information on blog linking various content from different web pages in the blog. We had used wordpress.com for our blogging purpose. Now almost all the participants have their own blog and we are trying our best to make it worth visiting placing useful and effective information that attract the visitors.

At the end of the session there was an interaction period where everyone were free to question about the relating matter. Bishnu Gautam student of BSc Ag 3rd Semester, raised a question " How could we link ICT and Agriculture for the upliftment of production in present context of Nepal? ". Likely Sanzog Poudel BSc Ag 6th Semester made himself clear raising the question " Is social networking really beneficial for poor farmers? " There was question from Bibekananda Mahat of 4th Semester regarding how to make ICT approachable to every farmers of ground level. Suresh Shimkhada of 3rd Semester quench his thirst of knowing  the role of Agriculturist in the field of ICT. These queries were made cleared by our mentor Mr. Panday with an ease. The whole session was interactive and knowledgeable. Session ran for almost 7 hours with two short refreshment breaks.

The program was helpful and has been a landmark in the utilization of the web resources to boost up the knowledge gaining process. The ideas shared by our mentor Mr. Dinesh Panday were very useful and none of participants were thankless. We hope to get such programs from the Amnesty International Nepal Paklihawa Youth Network, YCSA Paklihaawa Campus, YES Agriculture and YPARD that will help us build our personality and skills.