The First and Second Day of the Training

The first day of the training was really awesome! We were exposed to a number of activities; first of all, each of us explained personal expectations from the training. Thereafter, the trainer who is also the journalist and programme coordinator from the Finnish Foundation for Media and Development (Vikes), Mr, Peik Johansson facilitated the discussion on issues like how Internet has changed societies. We also learnt the extent to which the Websites have drastically changed the world. To mention few, these are the e-bay, Wikipedia, you tube, blogger and the amazon.com.

Also, we went through the world’s statistics for internet users and uses of Internet from technical view point. We further discussed about journalism in the age of Internet. Eventually the trainer, Mr. Peik equipped us with technical skills on how to open blogs and encouraged us to start posting something on the particular blogs.

Lastly, we were assigned to search from Google the Rupert Murdoch’s speech to American society of Newspaper Editors on April 13, 2005 which would lead the discussions in the following days.

On the second day of the training, we practically worked on our blogs; we also learnt how internet could be used as a tool in everyday journalism. We were also introduced to journalistic research techniques, for instance, how to search for facts, sources and background information from the search engines like Google. The trainer also provided us with some simple tips to be taken into account when conducting research. These include thinking first before going to the web and choosing the right search words.

Generally, I liked almost everything in the training, despite of the time constraints.

To be continued…