In general ENTOM767 has been a very useful class and the idea of incorporating the new communication media seems more than appropriate to me. In fact, I think that in the 21 st century college classes should be using more of the electronic media to exposed students to the new way of communicating things. For instance, in my opinion it seems sort of archaic that we are still submitting reports in physical paper.
With that said, from my experiences in this class I found very useful the use of Twitter (more feed-back is required here though), Blogspot (it was very neat to see our lab reports in the web, and to see what others were reporting), Wetpaint (this was amazing and I am very glad to see all the work we did here) and K-state online (which it has been a very useful tool since my first semester here). However, I never got to use the Netvibes and for that reason, without considering it is a useless tool, I would consider it could be dropped.
Given my experiences with the webtools, I would consider that the only one I wouldn't be using very much could be the Netvibes. As I never got to use this tool during the semester, I tend to believe I could be taking advantage of the possibilities offered by others without necessarily counting on this media hub. However, if in the future I am administrating different tools and I need to have a way to display everything in the same place, Netvibes could be the way to go. That's why I said previously that I do not consider this is a useless tool -because it could be quite handy, but as a student of the class I never really got in to it
If I were designing the ultimate web-based decision support system for managing pests, I would find very useful to incorporate features as a diagnostic key with pretty good pictures of the damage in different angles and a very nice set of recommendations as we had in the bugbytes. However, in terms of the diagnostic key I would include not only pictures of the damage and/or insect associated, but a very good written description of the conditions in which the damage can be found and the possible variations observed in field. It would not necessarily be as a text book or catalog, but as a set of excerpts from the expert (or group of experts) accompanying the diagnostic images and telling the reader about the possible variations of what she/he can find in the field and the solutions she/he may have to face the problem.
If I were designing the ultimate web-based decision support system for managing pests, I would find very useful to incorporate features as a diagnostic key with pretty good pictures of the damage in different angles and a very nice set of recommendations as we had in the bugbytes. However, in terms of the diagnostic key I would include not only pictures of the damage and/or insect associated, but a very good written description of the conditions in which the damage can be found and the possible variations observed in field. It would not necessarily be as a text book or catalog, but as a set of excerpts from the expert (or group of experts) accompanying the diagnostic images and telling the reader about the possible variations of what she/he can find in the field and the solutions she/he may have to face the problem.
With all that said, I would only add that I enjoyed the class, I learned a lot of new stuff which is always cool, and I am very sure I will be using some of these tools in my near future while trying to coordinate with extensionists and farmers about the problems and recommendations of pest management situations in the field.
Thanks,
German.
