Date: 18th November 2019
The Department of Agricultural Extension and Community Development would like to welcome all first years who have joined our department to pursue Applied Extension for the academic year 2019/2020. Agricultural extension is an interesting program that conjoins communication and educational dimensions to enable farmers and peasants improve their quality of life. As such, extension is an on-going process of getting useful information to people (communication) to assist them acquire the necessary knowledge (education) (cognitive domain),skills (psychomotor domain), and Attitudes (Affective domain).
The educational component involves three domains: Knowledge (cognitive) domain dealing with intellectual or mental skills; skills (psychomotor) domain dealing with acquisition of physical or manual skills; and Attitude (Affective) domain that deals with feelings, and values of the clients. Extension experts and practitioners engage in the educational component by assisting people to learn. Communication involves getting useful information to clients. Within that context, extensionist ensures successful passage of a message or information from one person to another. It is not until a message, has been successfully interpreted by a target audience, that one can claim to have communicated.
Thus, communication is that proportion of the message or information, which is shared between the sender and the receiver. Extension experts and practitioners strive to establish commonage between their fields of experiences and the field of experiences of their clients. Welcome to the club of change agents.