How to make popcorn with mobile phones

This is the first posting from an internet workshop for editors and journalism trainers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. So far we have 13 participants in class, most of them news editors or editors-in-chief of Tanzanian radio stations or newspapers based here in Dar es Salaam, as well as three trainers from local journalism schools. To that you can also add two participants from MISA Tanzania, the local chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, and myself, Peik Johansson, journalist from Finland and trainer of this 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 the second workshop within a training programme on internet for journalists planned to run for three years. We had the first pilot workshop in August this year. For more on that pilot workshop, you can visit the blogs produced as part of it.

Today, we have spent some time introducing ourselves to each others. Then I was showing some examples on how people in countries like Finland get some of their services done via internet. So even we went to buy a train ticket in Finland using the internet and also checked how to purchase a Kenya Airways flight ticket from Nairobi to Bujumbura. We had a discussion on internet banking as well. One of the participants is using internet banking of the local CRDB Bank.

We also visited some websites which have in one way or the other had an impact in transforming the world into what it is today. We edited the media section of Tanzania at Wikipedia, watched a funny video at YouTube on how to make popcorn with mobile phones, and visited the ICT site Slashdot.com where users are providing most of the contents.

Now the participants are writing their first postings for their blogs that will be opened today.