Internet Training Participants for Lake Zone

Some of the participants attended for the Internet Training for Lake Zone Journalists and Lecturers held at the BOT Training Institute in Mwanza city.

Travel writer Binyavanga Wainaina

Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan freelance travel writer. He was born in 1971 in Rift Valley Province, Nakuru. Among of the schools he attended was Moi Primary School in Nakuru, Mangu High School in Thika and Lenana School in Nairobi. At the university level he studied Commerce at the University of Transkei(now Walter Sisulu University) in South Africa.

Wainaina landed in Dar es Salaam at Julius Nyerere International Airport when he was coming from South Africa attending her mother funeral celebrations in Nairobi. Suprisingly, his luggage was missing and made him felt the memories of her lovely mother badly.

Luckily enough, the sadness was relieved by the hospitality of Tanzanians which is uncomparable to any other countries he visited in his life."In which other African airport can you get real assistance?" he said. He even compared with his own country Kenya where things are very quite different. People were very much helpful and concerned about the dissappearance of his luggage. " Everyone is hugely supportive and soon the entire airport seems to know that my luggage is missing and I am headed for a funeral. I am overwhelmed by assistance " he said. He mentioned a lady at the Air Tanzania office, (ATCL)whose her hospitality made her felt pity for Wainaina and made coffee with maandazi for him and later she organized the next morning flight for him. Because of the support he got from people at the airport some luggage were found and the rests went to Entebbe.

Wainaina have never been to Dar es Salaam before. That was his first trip to spent a night to Dar but he enjoyed every moment he had stayed with Tanzanians. The tax driver known as Kesho who took him to a guest house and a place to eat during that night was very helpful to him. This made him promise to come back to TZ and say "What makes me, a Kenya want to travel here more is the welcome." He called the story "He's my brother."

Wainaina has written a series of stories such as: Before You Die; The Hidden Treasure of Mathare; Riding a Harley in cape Town and many more. More information
This brings an attention to any other African especially Tanzanians. We have to develop a culture of reading, writing and fact finding whatever we feel has importance to the great number of people should be written. Wainaina here is sharing with us his experience of being in the country like Tanzania as a writer. I believe we tanzanians too have very good stories to tell the world. We are travelling here and there within and outside the country. It is not bad to tell other people our experiences and what we learn on our trips.

Sometimes, it might be information with good or bad taste all in all people should be informed and make their own decisions. Writing in this regard enhance democracy, this is because people get the opportunity of being aware of the issues and other people's perception in the long run they make democratic decision.

We Tanzanians should start writing critically for the benefit of society.

The fourth day of our Internet Training

As the training goes on it becomes more interesting and attractive. People are becoming more enquisitive in learning more and more new things especially on our blogs.

The day started by visiting various websites using the simplest way of copying the title of the material you want to search in our work and then pasting them to google site. So, we visited Aljeezera.com, Inter Press Service News Agency, and MISA-TAN. Later, we learn on how to create links to our postings.

Before lunch we had an exercise on reaching different websites phone numbers and addresses. We came across Zain Tanzania, Media Council of Tanzania, tanzania National Parks, The White House, Ministry of Health and Social Welfare Tanzania, and Information Officer of Amnesty International.

The today’s demonstration continued to be very useful to my knowledge. The knowledge added value to my academic life.

Immediately after lunch we came to the journalistic practical assignments. We learn on how to edit information while cross-checking and getting reliable information in the internet. Unfortunately, it is not just the matter of getting information from internet but checking the accuracy of the source of the particular report and facts. Sometimes, people come to trust information from the internet while there is a chance of editing and adding any information for instance in the Wikipedia. So, it is better to cross-check our information basing on its accuracy and reliability.

At the end of the internet training we had an assignment to do on writing features on the given topics: Barack Obama and early years; Albinos in Tanzania; Nestle Boycot; World trade Centre Building 7; Climate change and Mount kilimanjaro and Binyavanga Wainaina. We are supposed to search for the materials relevant to these topics and write a good feature story about one of the topic picked.

This brings a challenge because the idea here is to find out whether participants can effectively utilize various relevant websites in searching the facts about the given topic. Moreover, the issue of plagiarism came in, so participants who will write using both English and Swahili languages should be very careful because will also link to the original documents. This also come to my attention to those who will use Swahili language because one can translate information as it is and that is plagiarism too.

Thank you very much Peik for the days we spent together in this internet training. I wish to continue with this spirit of being enquisitive to the contemporary issues going on in the world. Hope to continue seeing participants blogs because this is just the beginning and not the end, and death of our blogs.

Exciting third day of our Internet training

We started well with full internet connection on our computers. So, we visited various websites as usual based on todays theme of journalistic activities on the internet. Therefore, it was obvious we learn and familiarize ourselves with the different news sites on the internet IPS News, IFJ. Among of those sites we visited are local tanzania newspapers, radio and television stations. The most surprising issue I discover into our local media in Tanzania is that there are no updates to our websites. I can't figure out the reasons behind this. Later we came across through international newspapers, news agencies,and various television stations websites.

I came to realize that most of local journalists do not visit different internet websites as their source of information and critically analyse some issues related to our local content "Media Power and Politics".

As a communicator the knowledge of internet is very much important. This is because through the internet one can read and access so many information online and have enough knowledge when communicating with people. The challenge is also into our working environment where you find there are no enough computers and reliable internet connections. But still people can do an extra efforts by may be buying private modem and use them into their own PC. In this era of the digital and information age journalists and communicators should have the contemporary knowledge on everything. Therefore, it is also a challenge for the media owners to empower their jounalists so that they can write critical and analytical reports. On the contrary they can't do that while the working environment don't correspond with their skills.

The most interesting and exciting thing of today's activity was that, I came to understand various news and academic websites which are useful to my field of knowledge. MISA-TAN

It happened that before tea break everything went well regarding to the internet connections. Unfortunately, when we came back the internet went down and made our noon difficulty.

The good thing was that when we come back from lunch the internet was back and we saw lots of websites. Then we had a practical assignments on how to search different information on google.

The second day of Internet Training for the Lake Zone Journalists

The second day started smoothly and exciting. This was because, we visited the top fifteen leading websites that managed to change the world since 1991. Those websites are ebay.com, wikipedia.com, napster.com, youtube.com, blogger.com, drudgereport.com, and myspace.com. Others are amazon.com, slashdot.com, salon.com, google.com, and yahoo.com.

It has been a woderful day because each member of the workshop created his / her own blog. This has been my expectation since the first day of the workshop.

It was frustrating because when we came back from lunch the internet connections went down. So, i didn't manage to write my comments due to that problem.

Hoping to come with my laptop tomorrow so that i can do my work smoothly.

My view

Today, we have discussed about the brief history of Internet, how internet has changed societies, different uses of Internet in our daily lives and the statistics of the Internet users in the world. Also, we discussed some of the reasons that make Tanzania to have less number of Internet users compared to Kenya and Uganda "Internet Usage Statistics for Africa".

Moreover, we learn on how to book an online train and air tickets. At first, we booked a train ticket from Helsinki to Turku and later a return plane ticket from Dar es Salaam to Bujumbura. In this respect, we also visited some other websites such as CRDB and NBC.

Unfortunately, we started our workshop a little bit late due to technical problems happened to our computers. Internet went off for sometimes so the trainer (Peik) went through the theoretical parts of the content while waiting for the internet. Therefore, when everything went on the right track my computer had no internet till the end of the day.

Lastly, we learnt on how to keep the history of our websites we visited in a day. And also, we went further on different ways of clearing history of our websites.

My expectations from this workshop are as follows:
 At the end of this workshop I expect to create my own blog. This blog will help me in my teaching. I will be giving my students lots of information through the blog such as materials for extra reading, various academic websites they can access, and class assignment for the group discussion.
 It will help me when I will be teaching Online Radio and TV in my class.
 It will give me skills and knowledge of Internet, so when teaching it will be easy for me to clarify some issues related to internet to my students.