Am Happy To See The ATI e-Extension Portal, But Unhappy Not To See 1 Necessary Component – A Knowledge Bank!

I don’t really know, but I think I came to know “Knowledge is power” when I was in high school yet, between the years 1952 and 1957, because I know I was already a voracious reader and the library of the high school department of the Rizal Junior College (RJC) in my hometown of Asingan, Pangasinan, was full of reading materials and open to wide readers like me. (I could even take 3 or more books out for the weekend.)

I just checked the Internet and Wikipedia tells me (en.wikipedia.org) the phrase came from Sir Francis Bacon. Today, if you are out of school for whatever reason, further knowledge is out of your power – unless you are connected to the Internet.

Today, Friday, 31 March 2023, I have been googling on the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) of my country under the PH Department of Agriculture (DA), and come across the ATI’s “e-Extension Portal” (e-extension.gov.ph); about it, the ATI website says:

The electronic delivery of extension service is undertaken through a network of institutions that provide a more efficient alternative to a traditional extension system for agriculture, fisheries, and natural resources sectors. It maximizes the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to attain a modernized agriculture and fisheries sector. It focuses on creating an electronic and interactive bridge where farmers, fishers, and other stakeholders meet and transact to enhance productivity, profitability, and global competitiveness.

ATI, you Congratulations, ATI! Glad to say, “Your e-Extension Portal is all for the better!” Sorry to say, the Portal is talking about a “knowledge-base” but not a “knowledge bank” – there is a whole world of a difference!

What we need is an open library for people who are interested in farming but not familiar at all with any of the scientific terms like “chemical fertilizers” and “Climate Change” and “greenhouse gases” – how do you introduce those to the innocent, unknowing mind? That is the duty of the Knowledge Bank.

Sometime in 2003, then-Director General of ICRISAT William Dar submitted a proposal for the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture (OpAPA) via PhilRice after PhilRice Executive Director “Leo” Leonardo Sebastian personally invited me to be a consultant of PhilRice at that time. Inspired and excited, I came up with a 198-page digital book I titled The Geography Of Knowledge (TGoK); in the book, I outlined (with careful “instructions”) for knowledge workers how to create TGoK.

The ATI website says, “The electronic extension (e-Extension) program for agriculture and fisheries started in the Agricultural Training Institute” was launched in 2007 “to integrate and harmonize [an] ICT-based extension delivery system for agriculture and fisheries.” 16 years later and I can’t find it!

Now then, I am offering a digital copy of TGoK to ATI or DA. Intelligently, TGoK should transform into an attractive invisible teacher with inexhaustible knowledge! (Yes, like reading from 333 books any 1 day!)

ATI, your e-Extension Portal is a non-mover of knowledge. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Life is a progress, not a station.”@517

Can You Find An Open-Hearted Publication Dedicated To Open-Hearted Agriculture (OA)? I Aim To Found An OA Magazine & Find OA Financing

Many politics-minded people talk above their heads conjuring with PH President Ferdinand “BBM” Marcos Jr of PhP20/kg rice and congratulating themselves on personal mirrors. This time, I want to talk about what I call the “Open-Hearted Mirror.”

What do I mean by “open-hearted?” Jamie Greenwood says Elizabeth Lesser says (Tiny Buddha, tinybuddha.com, source of above image):

A broken heart is not the same as sadness. Sadness occurs when the heart is stone cold and lifeless. On the contrary, there is an unbelievable amount of vitality in a broken heart.

That’s a lady quoting another lady – ah, but what I am proposing is for all, no sex preferences. Today, our agriculture is one of sadness because the heart is cold and careless – it cares so much more about achieving higher yields (for farmers) and lower buying prices (for consumers), and so much less about the farmers’ victory of returns over costs.

I will now compare my proposed OA Magazine and Manila Bulletin’s Agriculture Monthly (AgriMon – my coinage).

AgriMon publishes occasionally articles on organic farming, but most often, on inorganic (chemical) farming – if unaware. What that tells us is that either (1) the AgriMon Editor In Chief is not aware of the vital need for organic agriculture, and/or (2) s/he cares more about revenues for the magazine and less revenues for the farmers and even less returns in the fight against Climate Change – s/he does not know or does not understand the fact that chemical fertilizers and pesticides when applied generate greenhouse gases (GHGs), and the GHGs are the ones that generate Climate Change?

I am an agriculturist who cares much both about Farmer Poverty as well as Climate Change – and, having studied the matter, I believe that organic agriculture can solve Farmer Poverty and resolve Climate Change simultaneously!

I am reading the article by the current editor Yvette Tan: “Agriculture Magazine Celebrates Its 25^th Anniversary” that is dated 20 March 2022 (the magazine’s first issue was printed October 1997). Ms Yvette says, “The purpose of Agriculture magazine was, and remains, simple: ‘To help promote a more productive, more profitable and more sustainable agriculture.’”

But Ma'am, “sustainable agriculture” talks more about sustaining/improving yields and less about fighting against Farmer Poverty and against Climate Change!

Thus my pursuit of organic agriculture. Today, as a self-taught typewriter-aided aggie writer & editor since 1975, and self-taught digital publisher since 1994, I am thinking of coming out with the “OA Magazine” (Open-Hearted Agriculture Magazine). It will be produced by a Digital One-Man Band (DOMB). This DOMB fellow will perform all editing, desktop publishing and follow-up on a commercial print-on-demand printing.

Any financial sponsors interested?

OA Magazine will pay for articles both from solicited and unsolicited sources.

Anyone may submit an article for publication. Technical people can rewrite technical papers, using common people-friendly terms.

“Open-Hearted Agriculture.” Unfortunately, “Sustainable Agriculture” is no longer enough! The urgent intertwined need is to solve Farmer Poverty and resolve Climate Change – and this is through Organic Agriculture.@517

InqSkwela – Is PH Inquirer Current In Thinking About Students’ Love Of Reading And Knowledge? Asking As A Teacher!

Once a teacher, always a teacher. An alumnus of UP Los Baños, right now, I am reading about “InqSkwela,” the Inquirer Foundation’s social responsibility program launched in 2019, which distributes printed Inquirer copies to select highly populated public schools in Metro Manila, for free. “With an easier access to a newspaper, the hope is that students would discover or further develop their love of reading and knowledge in current events” (undated, Inquirer, inquirer.com.ph).

The latest news on InqSkwela is this (Jane Bautista, 05 March 2023, “Manila, Schools Latest InqSkwela Partners,” Inquirer.net, newsinfo.inquirer.net):

Twenty public schools in the City of Manila will now have access to Inquirer Plus, the digital edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer…, under a partnership that offers the paper… as an educational material that can help hone learning skills and enrich classroom discourse.

The 20 schools are unidentified; nonetheless, it is worth pointing out why InqSkwela has come out in the first place. Ms Jane says:

According to Inquirer Foundation [Executive Director] Connie Kalagayan, InqSkwela was conceived in response to the 2018 findings of the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] where the Philippines scored the lowest in reading comprehension out of the 79 countries evaluated.

The PISA is “a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)… to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance [in] mathematics, science and reading” (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). The OECD is 60 years old (“Who We Are,” OECD, oecd.org).

As a public school teacher, Civil Service Professional (1964), I find the international OECD’s (and thereby the Philippine Inquirer’s) educational motive applaud-able – but the method antiquated.

Why was/is the PISA centered only on only 3 areas: math, science & reading? The OECD has to learn more!

There are, as far as I know, as I believe Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), that everyone of us has these potential thinking & acting smarts: athleticism, thinking about life & people & self, language, math, music, nature and space (art).

If InqSkwela wants to be smart in helping Filipino students, I suggest it creates a new Inquirer digital medium dedicated to multiple intelligences. That easy, that difficult – that smart!

And no, not necessarily funds-depleting: InqSkwela could ask volunteer writers to submit their works for free.

Contents & contentions will have to be all positive. How? Follow the “Rotary 4-Way Test” –
(“4-Way Test” from eastlansingrotaryclub.com)

Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

Now then, I propose that InqSkwela morph into this:

InQKuwela

Where “Kuwela” means “a happy tune, lighthearted show” (Tagalog.com, tagalog.com). InQKuwela will need at least PH 1M to start the balls rolling and the bells ringing.

I’m volunteering as Digital Editor In Chief right now, “digital” also meaning “work from home” (WFH). This WFH will help write the proposal for funding by either the ADB, USAID, or World Bank.

InQKuwela will change public education the world over!@517

ChatGPT – Isn’t That Us Thinking Like Robots? Asking For A Friend!

Inquirer columnist Segundo Eclar Serrano says, unequivocally: “ChatGPT: Making Inclusive Education Possible” (21 March 2023, Philippine Daily Inquirer (opinion.inquirer.net). He is agog at how a robot can produce educational materials with just 1 human command request; I teacher, thinking digitally both critically and creatively, am unimpressed.

He writes:

… I have been testing ChatGPT for a week now and I am terribly impressed by its capabilities. I asked the app, “Write me a problem scenario where the people in a poor community adjacent to a nickel mine are divided into those who advocate the mine to be closed for its damage to the environment and those who advocate that it remains for the jobs that it provides. What kind of process might enable them to arrive at a workable community decision?” The app produced a realistic and well-documented scenario and process that could be role-played in a political science, environmental science, or development studies class.

Whatever! That is tantamount to saying, “We don’t need teachers anymore – in the Philippines at US$20/month (yugatech.com), ChatGPT is cheaper than 20 teachers!”

For creative writing, what or how would ChatGPT teach the student? It could not; it would not – it would just think out for the student and write the piéce de assistance. As teacher, ChatGPT will be producing robots with human forms.

As a teacher, I believe in the “multiple intelligences (MI)” theory of Harvard professor Howard Gardner. I will now reinvent MI into what I call “9 Ways of Intelligent Thinking” (9 WITs), and these are:

1.   Bodily-Kinesthetic – “Body-Movement Thinking”
2.   Existential – “Life Thinking”
3.   Interpersonal – “People Thinking”
4.   Intrapersonal – “Self Thinking”
5.   Linguistic-Verbal – “Language Thinking”
6.   Logical-Mathematical – “Number/Reasoning Thinking”
7.   Musical – “Sound Thinking”
8.   Naturalistic – “Nature Thinking”
9.   Spatial – “Picture Thinking”.

Those 9 WITs are 9 ways of initiating thinking towards learning.

Not with ChatGPT. With the Department of Education implementing the “awesome” ChatGPT, how will we teach students how to think themselves!?

Mr Serrano says ChatGPT is one of the Large Language Models (LLMs):

LLMs are designed to be meaningfully predictive purveyors of the world’s accumulated recorded data, thus promising to narrow the gap between “private ignorance” and “public ignorance.” Public ignorance refers to questions the world does not yet have the answers to, despite the efforts of scientists and researchers who keep pushing the envelope of public knowledge.

Is Mr Serrano saying that with ChatGPT, anyone can be knowledgeable at once?

Private ignorance afflicts those who are poorly informed and educated, involuntarily marinated in fake news, propaganda, superstition, and disinformation.

Is Mr Serrano saying ChatGPT provides only verified news, will bypass what it identifies as “propaganda,” will ignore “superstition,” and will identify pieces of “disinformation”?

The world is awash with knowledge, information, and data, but… the educational system is decrepit – not enough teachers, not enough classrooms, not enough learning resource materials, not enough systems to achieve educational goals, and not enough political imagination and political will to enable real and effective problem-solving in education.

Mr Serrano, ChatGPT will think for all humans? I think not!@517

Sen Cynthia Villar – We Could Solve Farmer Poverty And Resolve Climate Change Simultaneously! Here’s Your “Regenerative Whisperer”

Dear Senator Cynthia Villar: Fate has destined you as Chair of 2 Senate Committees: (1) Agriculture, Food & Agrarian Reform, and (2) Environment, Natural Resources & Climate Change. Today, look at this Scientific Truth, that those long names contain this relationship:

Current Chemical “Agriculture” contributes to “Climate Change”!

Truly, on one hand, we need intelligent and diligent political leaders to craft national policies to solve national problems. On the other hand, we need scientifically aware media people to help solve Farmer Poverty and resolve Climate Change. Truly, Ma'am, it’s an uphill battle!
(“Uphill” from philstar.com)

Charie Mae F Abarca says, “Progressive Groups To Villar: Filipino Farmers And Fisherfolk Are Not Ignorant” (21 Oct 2022, Manila Bulletin, mb.com.ph):

In a public hearing for the proposed 2023 budget for the Department of Agriculture (DA), on Wednesday, Oct 19, Villar hinted that “farmers and fishermen do not understand climate change.”

I agree with you, Madam Senator! 100%.

Actually, in my digital search for knowledge for blogging (about 10 million words since 2000), I know that I, agriculturist and advocate of “Primate Change,” having followed the news on Climate Change since ex-US Vice President Al Gore and the IGPCC started the campaign and co-won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 or 16 years ago – I estimate that 97% of people in the Philippines – and elsewhere in the world – do not truly understand Climate Change!

Considering that, rather than “educating” the farmers directly on Climate Change, I strongly recommend that we educate our people, starting with the Department of Agriculture (DA) on the wide area of “Regenerative Agriculture”(RA)  – everyone would be interested to find out how this kind of agriculture can solve Farmer Poverty and at the same time resolve Climate Change!

Practicing RA, farmers will be happy to proceed with their farming at the minimum costs and maximum returns, and at the same time reduce to zero the greenhouse gases that their chemical fertilizers and pesticides are generating!

The farmers are still insisting that the government grant their wishes – not stopping themselves from practicing Chemical Agriculture (CA) that is the main cause of Climate Change! So, how can the farmers deny that they are ignorant of Climate Change?

The government has the right to demand that the farmers stop applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides and start applying organic fertilizers and organic pesticides. If they do neither of those, that definitely proves that farmers are ignorant of Climate Change!

That is why I am proposing right now that the Senate office of Senator Cynthia Aguilar Villar provide funds for a massive Internet Knowledge (iKnow) Program. Nationally, iKnow will make available data & information via the Internet – and do active extension work – on Regenerative Agriculture. And yes, the Department of Agriculture (DA) must have less politics and more science! The DA must actively assist farmers in carrying out regenerative farming.  

Madame Senator, we are not getting younger. Meanwhile, we could deliver God’s Love by spreading the “Gospel of Regenerative Agriculture.” Here I am, your “Regenerative Whisperer”!@517

You Doubt That The Boy Jose Rizal Wrote At 8 The Poem “Sa Aking Mga Kabata” – I Doubt That You Have Realized That He Had Developed His Multiple Intelligences!

In public service, I teacher (and self-taught writer) say. “You need History, you need Published Knowledge Research – and you need to think to understand it all!” And that’s whether you are actually and/or virtually teaching in or out of school. Like Sunday in Manila, 19 March 2023, I see a sharing of Evelyn P Antonio (whom I know is a lover of “Pilipino” as national language), yesterday’s Facebook post, “The Legacy Of A Fake Rizal Poem” by Jose Victor Torres. The poem is “Sa Aking Mga Kabata” (“To Kids Of My Own Time” – my translation). And I see that here is Rizal still being completely misunderstood and/or misinterpreted.

In summary, Mr Torres claims all these:

(1)     There is no original manuscript; therefore, its origin is doubtful.

(2)     Rizal did not write that poem – somebody else did.

(3)     He could not have written it at 8 years of age.

(4)     In that poem, Rizal compared Tagalog with Latin, English, Spanish. 

(5)     The letter “k” did not appear in Tagalog orthography until many years later.

My rebuttal:

#1 – Nonsequitur. I honestly can claim that I have written myself about 10,000 essays and I have no originals of thousands of them! (I have blogged them, yes.)

#2 – Authorship. There is no proof that somebody else wrote it.

#3 – Age, Ability & Assistance. Remember that the boy Rizal had a learned mother: Teodora  Alonso Realonda “came from a financially able family and studied at the Colegio de Santa Rosa in Manila, just like her mother who was well-bred and had an educational background in the subjects of mathematics and literature” (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). So! Her little son could have written a draft, and she could have helped him finish it into the poem “Sa Aking Mga Kabata.”

#4 – Comparing languages. Read again the original stanza: “Ang wikang Tagalog tulad din sa Latin / sa Ingles, Kastila at salitang anghel / sapagka’t ang Poong maalam tumingin / ang siyang naggawad, nagbigay sa atin.” My translation: “The Tagalog language is like Latin / English, Spanish, and angelic tongue / because God who has the wisdom / is He who gave to us did assign.”

Definitely, the boy’s poem compares Tagalog with other languages only as far as wisdom is concerned. No single language in the world can claim knowledge singularly!

#5 – Dating language partially. The letter “K” could have been simply “introduced” into the title years after the poem was written. As simple as that!

Look at the above “Neurodiversity” presentation of 9 images referring to 9 multiple intelligences (MI) as according to Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. Applying MI, we can appreciate how Rizal was smarter than most of us Filipinos: agriculturist, artist, businessman, debater, doctor, engineer, linguist, novelist, poet, taxonomist, teacher, and translator.
(“Neurodiversity” from amazon.com, original “Jose Rizal” from slideshare.net)

Shouldn’t we all try to be as many times smart as Jose Protacio Rizal, our National Hero, showed us? Asking like a friend!@517

BBM-DA – Please, Don’t Quit On The Filipino Farmers And The Whole Country On Climate Change – “Don’t Say Die Until You’re Dead!”

Why am I writing this? Someone I know just quit along the way to desktop publishing (DTP) a book on Regenerative Agriculture (RA) on a very commercial crop – sayang! Me, I have never quit in my writing, editing, blogging and publishing books & journals applying my self-taught digital abilities, from draft to DTP products printed commercially. I have always said, “Don’t say die until you’re dead!”

(“Don’t Quit” from shutterstock.com)

My most memorable DTP works are (a) 7 books as writer from home (WFH) on the aims & accomplishments of ICRISAT when William Dar was ICRISAT Director General (2000-2014), and (b) the coffee-table book I was asked to produce by Executive Director Jovita M Corpuz for the Agricultural Credit Policy Council (ACPC) – and so, we made publishing history in the Philippines and abroad! History: We came out with commercially printed copies of The Filipino Farmer Is Bankable (150 pages) right on the date of the 25^th Anniversary of the ACPC: 25 April 2012.

[Note: JMC picked me from out of nowhere and I had less than 2 months to prepare, from page proposal to preliminary printed pages for public perusal – the works! That in effect actually tested the speed and quality of my digital abilities in writing, editing, desktop publishing – which included trips to photograph pinpointed places & projects. Immediate results: Title, texts and 50% of the photographs in that ACPC coffee-table book were mine – approved by the ACPC naturally. (If you want more details on that story, you can Ctrl+click this link: frankahilario.blogspot.com.)]

Ancient: I’m 82+, and I have been praying to the Almighty to, please, give me at least 28 more years – please don’t quit on me! Genius: The phrase “Don’t Quit” has in itself embedded the alternate and A-OK act: “Do It.”

Somebody’s unfinished book would have been The World’s First in RA in that crop. I guess the major reason for that fellow quitting in producing that volume is that the author’s allied DTP work is exhausting. I know that. If you ask me to DTP your book, you will experience repeated editings – up to 12 or more times – each time I ask you to read line by line exactly like I do it! Patience, my friend. Remember: Patience is a Virtue, producing pre-eminent pages.

Here are my pertinent personal digital experiences since 2000, some lessons to learn:

(1)   Have patience, patience, patience!

(2)   Have help from a person who knows what he’s doing – and believe in him.

(3)   Digital is the key – No need for physical appearances or meetups, not even virtual.

(4)   Know (or get to know) your target readers well.

(5)   Know your subject well – if not now, you’re not ready!

Regenerative Agriculture (RA) – if I had the funds, I would publish within 60 days a single-authored volume on the many methods, practices, principles and philosophies of RA that farmers can adopt to help solve Farmer Poverty for themselves and simultaneously help resolve Climate Change for the whole country!@517

OA Proposal, A Magazine To Popularize Organic Agriculture (OA) In The Philippines

Frankly And Honestly – This is the best way I can serve my country the Philippines, that is, indirectly selling organic agriculture (OA) produce by directly selling the science and sense of OA by one-man-banding the publication of an OA digital monthly magazine. The tentative name: “Organic PH” with the guiding principle: “If I don’t see any worm in the produce you are selling, you are not organic!”

(Images: “farm produce” from philstar.com, “worm” from alamy.com)

What credentials do I have to produce a new publication in agriculture, darlingly dedicated to organic farming? I have to tell you that my idea of OA began in 1966 when I discovered in the open shelves of my alma mater UP College of Agriculture (now UP Los Baños) the twin revolutionary books authored by American gentleman farmer Edward H Faulkner, both published by the University of Oklahoma Press: Plowman’s Folly (1943), and Soil Development (1953).

The common American and Filipino farmers’ foolishness is plowing, inverting the soil with the weeds and/or crop leftovers or refuse – putting the organic matter out of reach of the roots of crops that farmers plant. Thus, farmers commonly need to apply expensive fertilizers; thus. farmers cause their own poverty!

How did I happen and/or prepare to be the one-man band to upgrade the thinking of Filipino agriculturists first, the farmers next? 3 ways:

1.   FAH Non-Digital

As a writer and editor, I was typewriter-driven from 1975 to 1980 at the Forest Research Institute (FORI), becoming founder & editor for the FORI monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly popular magazine Habitat. Those 3 publications made FORI well-known and well-liked at the campus of UP College of Agriculture, as well as in Africa and America.

2.   FAH Learning To Be Digital

Later, as an extension specialist of the Farming Systems & Soil Resources Institute (FSSRI) of UPLB, I began to teach myself digital works: writing, editing, and desktop publishing. On Innocents Day 1985, I began with learning WordStar version 1. That was when Elpidio “Pids” Rosario was Director of FSSRI – again, so, much thanks, Pids!

3.   FAH Digital

I never left the personal computer (PC) after that. I began appreciating blogging. Sometime in 2000, I began writing for the American Chronicle. After that magazine ceased to be, digitally I continued as an information sharer, thank God! Digital was already in my flesh & blood…….

2003, I became The Editor In Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science (PJCS) published 3 times a year by the Crop Science Society of the Philippines (CSSP). I became worthy of being included in the Guinness Book Of World Records because I singlehandedly brought the PJCS up-to-date from being 3-years late to being up-to-date in 3 years time, meaning I worked double time – and then with my editorial expertise, the CSSP applied for its PJCS and was included in the prestigious international list “ISI” (now “Web of Science”). Unbelievable? You better believe it!

To solve Farmer Poverty and resolve Climate Change, simultaneously, we need organic agriculture. OA!@517