Interest in educational webinars or videos

[Andy Carson]

I am curious if anyone who frequents this website would be interested in webinars or educational videos that might be given or created on a wide range of topics of interest to our community. Potential topics might include:

Conservation farming practices
Conservation grazing practices
Conservation forestry
Market gardening
Haying with animal power
Implementation of draft animals in modern forestry/farming
Marketing approaches
Value added products
Equipment demos hosted at the factory
Animal housing design
How to attract and best utilize volunteers on your farm
Introduction to oxen
Introduction to horse power
Setting goals and measuring environmental impact
Composting techiques
Description of “standard practices” in the above areas from other parts of the world (particularly that might provide inspiration or alternatives to “standard US practices)

Please let me know your levels of enthusiasm for these and other topics and what you might want to see. Just fishing for ideas for our worldwide organization… Please let me know. I am looking for a brief comment or two from as many people as possible to get a representation of the whole group.

[Pete Jesse]

I would be interested in most of these.
If I spent an hour looking at each one that works out to 16 hours.–Sometimes it is tough to find that much time.
It would be great if they could also be archived.
Cornell currently has many forestry webinars (not draft related) which I watch.
thank you for the suggestion.

[henkdemink]

Would be very interesting for this side of the ocean too. Would be glad to assist as much as I can.
Henk

[Barw]

barw
I think it is an excellent idea and would be interested to partake.
Frankly I am surprised no one has brought the idea forward previously.

[Carl Russell]

Excellent idea…

[Donn Hewes]

Andy, I think it is a great idea too. I would be interested to know if people feel the educational videos or webinars would be more useful. I guess there would be pros and cons of each. This is a project we could invest time and energy in. Talk to you soon, Donn

[Andy Carson]

Perhaps we should think of the Lincoln woods project as a “pilot” for a video of this nature? There are certainly a lot of unknowns about how to do this, but I wanted to make sure others think this would be interesting…

[Michel Boulay]

This is a great excellent idea!
There are certainly some of you that are part of some sort of webinar site,
were good ideas on how to proceed can come from.
We already have some vids here which have help some of us. And the resource is right in front of us, everytime we go on DAP.

Mike

[Carl Russell]

@boulami 37813 wrote:

……
We already have some vids here which have help some of us. And the resource is right in front of us, everytime we go on DAP…..

Andy, there could be some solid ground covered by organizing some of what has already been linked on this site. http://www.draftanimalpower.com/forumdisplay.php?60-Education&order=desc
http://www.draftanimalpower.com/forumdisplay.php?66-Web-Links-to-Articles-Movie-Videos-and-Web-Sites
http://www.draftanimalpower.com/showthread.php?740-Harnessing-the-Powers-of-Youtube-for-Good&highlight=oxen+youtube

One of the resources that we had hoped DAPNet.org would provide would be a library of such links. Rather than trying to undertake production costs and marketing, pulling together existing videos and Webinars could build momentum, further enhancing the value of DAPNet to connect folks who are looking for these resources with those who are presenting them….

Carl

[Andy Carson]

It is a good idea to use some video that might already be “out there,” but what seems to be appreciated by many people (including myself) is video with commentary from an expert explaining what is being down in the video and the rationale behind the approach. Text comments could be added to selected videos easily enough from home without refilming the whole clip. This is real, useful information that adds to our content in a documentable and (I think) interesting way. I have been doing some reading on how to attract and engage folks who may have found us online, and have come to the conclusion that importantant and exclusive content is the most important factor. This is especially true of video content and andthing that is interactive in real time. I appreciate links to youtube videos, and have followed some of them, usually forgetting what I wanted to see in the first place. Once in the youtube rabbithole, I rarely come back to DAP.com. I realize that we cannot be all things to all people, but if we usually send people offsite if they want video content, I think we are doing ourselves a disservice. I could be wrong, but let’s a make a couple pilot videos of our own and see how pupular they are. Man must measure, right?

[Barw]

barw
Andy I agree we should try a pilot project.Keep everyone on site if possible.
I too find u-tube distracting.
There is a lot of knowledge out there among our members.

[fogish]

I like the idea, something that essentially has the DAP Net stamp of approval or recommendation on it instead of a link from a single member. I really like having so many subjects being covered, especially ones with limited educational availability. I am fairly isolated where I live and a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth so much more.
It is simple enough to embed the video here so that it can be viewed without taking anyone away from the DAP.com site. We can also look into other hosting services and video players that will not link to other videos the way youtube does.

[Kevin Cunningham]

Andy,

I think this is an excellent idea. After looking at your list, all of the topics seem to me very important and far reaching, but the list is long. In order for something like this to work well it should be started small and in an area that is very attractive to a lot of people. You have already done the research on what people look at when they come to this site so I think that should guide the initial short list of topics to start covering in either a video or webinar way. It might be hard to pare down but I think it would be wise to start small and not get overly ambitious with the range of topics. I am very interested in seeing more videos similar to what Tim Harrigan has posted. These little gems are invaluable to someone like myself who lacks a real time mentor for draft animals.

[Rick Alger]

Moonshadow had some ideas along this line awhile back. I think it’s a good concept, but it does raise the quality control issue. One of the how to clips I saw on another forum about wood cutting was appallingly unsafe.

[Tim Harrigan]

I think we will find ourselves swimming upstream if we seek to limit access to educational videos and other materials to this site. The overwhelming trend is for greater and easier access in all forms of educational content. So the delivery should be a tool to attract users to DAPNet, not requiring them to find DAPNet and then discover the content. For instance, links and references can be embedded in videos that raise awareness of DAPNet. If the video content is good, folks will come here and likely find other content that has value.

Video have great value in helping folks visualize methods, equipment, etc. But mostly they provide entertainment and a chance to inflict a little education in the process. But people’s attention span is pretty short and unless you have a very sharply defined educational content it is unlikely that you will be able to anticipate and answer the specific questions that they have. For us, the real value is in the interaction, the detailed discussion. So videos can inspire that, but not likely to replace it.

Videos that carry dense educational content take a lot of planning and effort. It is not easy to recreate conditions that arise occasionally but are worthy of discussion of how we assess the situation and apply specific tools or techniques to accomplish the task safely and effectively. I have some topics in mind but they would require me to have a camera with me everytime I work with Will, and be prepared to take the time take the video. So that would take a pretty well defined plan and probably months of gathering the pieces here and there. That is a barrier to getting it done.

So I guess the bottom line is that videos are not the answer, just one more piece of the picture that we can use to balance the approach. But we can certainly do a better job with it.

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