First day in the hot class

This is my first posting from an internet workshop for Tanzanian editors and journalists which started here in Dar es Salaam today. So far, we have 18 journalists in class: eight from print newspapers, seven from radio and TV, one independent newspaper correspondent and also one student and two facilitators from MISA-Tanzania, the local chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, one of the workshop organizers. Myself, I’m a journalist from Finland and trainer of the workshop.

The training is organized by MISA Tanzania together with the VIKES Foundation of Finland, the international solidarity foundation of the Union of Journalists and other Finnish media organizations, with financial support from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. This is already the third workshop of this kind since August last year. It is part of a training programme on internet for journalists planned to run for three years. For more on the previous workshops, you can visit the workshop blogs here and here with links to the blogs produced by the participants.

Then some words of the day itself. We started a bit late, when most participants had arrived and the computer and internet facilities were running well enough. Many thanks to the IT support people here at Tanzania Global Development Learning Centre for fixing things up fast.

After an introduction of participants and some tea with snacks, we did a few practical rehearsals: buying a train ticket in Finland via internet, finding a seat for a Tina Turner concert in Helsinki next April and making a booking for a Kenya Airways flight to Bujumbura. The purpose was to show how people in other countries are using the internet for getting some services, as the same developments are coming fast over here as well. I almost made a bet with Jiang Alipo from Daily News that within two years Tanzanian bus companies will also have developed online booking. Internet banking has been in Tanzania already for a while.

Then we spent some time editing the media section of the Wikipedia article about Tanzania, watched a funny football video at YouTube and visited the ICT site Slashdot.com where users are providing most of the contents.

At the end of the day, I showed some statistics on internet use in different countries, and a tense debate arose about the credibility of the data. If we believe the website Internet World Stats, the share of the people using the internet in neighbouring Kenya is eight times bigger than in Tanzania. Now some argued that the figures for Tanzania cannot be true as today even in the distant Mtwara region doctors and many NGO’s are connected to the internet and you would find internet cafés even in small towns. But others were more sceptical and said the figures were probably quite correct mentioning as a real-life example that here even some of the university graduates coming to media houses fresh from school seem to have almost no experiences of using a computer.

At this time of the day, the air-conditioning went down for a while. As the temperature outside is just about 35 degrees, the atmosphere in class was truly a bit hot.