Tweeting through the first training day

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 twenty-first 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.

We are just starting the second day of the training in a cool air-conditioned multimedia room of the Tanzania Global Learning Agency (TaGLA), located at the Institute of Finance Management, the leading business school in the country.

We now have eleven participants in class. This time six of them are editors or senior producers, including subeditors from two major national newspapers, editors from three radio stations, and a senior producer from the national TV station Channel Ten. The other five are journalism lecturers from the University of Dar es Salaam School of Journalism and Mass Communication and three other local journalism colleges.

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 acquire more knowledge and experience in the use of internet in order to make better stories and programmes at their media houses and to be able to improve the teaching at their journalism schools. George Baltazary from Time School of Journalism said he wished to learn how the use of internet can lead to social development.

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. In addition to the local Precision Air, a new low-cost airline called Fastjet has just recently joined the Tanzanian market with online booking and a possibility to pay the ticket with a money transfer from a mobile phone. We went on with another assignment to find out who is the owner of the newly launched company. Answer was the British investment company Lonhro, previously well-known for its cordial relations with Africa’s worst dictators.

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 some video clips on YouTube: the Nigerian football player Sunday Mba scoring the winning goal in the African Cup of Nations final on Sunday evening, and the South Korean music video Gangnam Style which has attracted the incredible 1.3 billion views so far. I showed how to edit a Wikipedia article and also shared ideas about the importance of online games. Closer to the end of the day, we visited the Twitter site of the Nurdin Selemani, one of our participants. He is the deputy chief editor of Radio France International Kiswahili and was tweeting throughout the whole day yesterday – about the Pope’s resignation, about the upcoming UEFA Champions League matches and the first TV debate of presidential aspirants in neighbouring Kenya. At the same time, he was actively taking part in the discussions in class.

Now the participants are opening their own blogs and posting a first introduction of themselves. I will provide links later.