Monday, March 7, 2011

Tovuti training in a cool classroom

This is my first posting from a one-week training course for Tanzanian editors and journalism lecturers in the use of internet, tovuti in Kiswahili, for fact-finding, news monitoring, communication and publication.

It is already the eighth such internet training event for Tanzanian journalists, part of a training programme launched in 2008 and organized jointly by MISA-Tanzania and VIKES Foundation, a solidarity organization of journalist associations in Finland, with support from the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

In the streets of Dar es Salaam it’s sweating hot today, but we have spent the entire working day in the intensively air-conditioned multimedia room of the Tanzania Global Development Learning Centre, located at the Institute of Finance Management, the leading business school in the country.

During the first day, we have had ten participants in class, mostly editors and other senior journalists from the national mainstream newspapers, but there’s also a radio producer from the government radio channel TBC and two lecturers from local journalism schools.

The speed of the network was a bit slow today due to a video conference taking place elsewhere in the same building, so we didn’t really manage to cover everything that was on the agenda. But at least we got started, learned to know each others, voiced our expectations, and visited a number of websites that have in one way or another changed the world in the quite recent era of internet.

We have seen what Americans buy from eBay and watched an already classic YouTube video on how to make popcorn with mobile phones. We edited the section about Tanzanian ethnic groups in the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia, and also did an exercise on how to buy a train ticket in Finland from my hometown Helsinki to Turku.

The last one was to show how people in the so called developed countries use many services through the internet.

At the end of the day, the participants opened their own blogs. I will provide links later.

No comments:

Post a Comment