Clearing the jungle in the tovuti class

This is my first posting from a five days 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 fifteenth 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 cool 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 eleven participants in class. They are mostly subeditors, news editors and feature writers from the national mainstream newspapers, radio stations and the government broadcasting corporation TBC, but there are also three lecturers from local journalism schools and the editor of the Kiswahili service of the IPS news agency.

We started the day with an introduction round and each participant listing their expectations for the training week. Most of them wished that they would learn more appropriate ways and better techniques to find information – “in order to clear a path in the internet jungle”, as Hikloch Ogola, journalism lecturer from Tumaini University, expressed it.

Many of the participants underlined that they want to share the new knowledge with their colleagues in their newsrooms.

Rose Haji, veteran journalist among many of the younger participants, admitted that she belongs to the P.O. Box generation, but after this training she hopes she will be well equipped to move on to the new era of dot.com.

After the introduction and a tea break, we did some exercises on how to book a train ticket in Finland and how to buy a flight ticket in Tanzania. (A new online booking service has just recently been launched by the local airline Precision Air.) We also 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 a YouTube video of Barack Obama in January 2009 saying that he promises to close down the Guantánamo detention camp within one year. We edited a Wikipedia article about the major local newspaper in Tanzania, shared ideas about the importance of online games, visited the Twitter site of the Somali militant Islamist movement al-Shabaab, and downloaded some electronic books from the website Project Gutenberg, which claims to have over 38,000 free ebooks in its collection.

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