Information Technology: Extension's Future

To help Extension move confidently into the next decade, we should begin by expanding on one of our strengths: information communication.Extension's key resource (information) isn't only renewable, but self-generating.For example: Between 6,000 and 7,000 scientific articles are written each day.Scientific and technical information now increases 13% per year, which means it doubles every 5.5 years.But, the rate will soon jump, to perhaps 40% per year because of new, more powerful information systems and an increasing population of scientists.That means that the data will double every 20 months.1