Tuesday 18 March 2014

Cool Day, Good Beginning



It was Monday morning, people from all walks of life crossed Uhuru Street from all directions in this tourist city. Arusha, once named the Geneva of Africa was busy. My colleagues and I joined pedestrians to cross the road to Summit Centre for Investigative Internet Training scheduled to kick start at 8.30 am.

The University of Dar es salaam Computing Centre (UCC), Arusha campus, based at the Summit Centre, is one of the busy places in the city, with a lot of trainings on ICT and computer science. Our training was at room number 3 of UCC located at the 4th floor of the centre.

The day supposed to start at 8.30, could not start at that time, instead we had to start at 9.30. “Only one person is yet to report, I think we can start,” said Peik Johansson, our international trainer from VIKES (Finnish Foundation for Media and Development). We were supposed to be 14 participants, but only 13 were in front of their computer keyboards.

The programme of the day started with introduction of the training given by Gasirigwa Sengiyumva, the Information/Research Officer of MISA-Tanzania. Then it was followed by self introduction, starting with the trainer. The most interesting part of self introduction was the investigative questions asked by the trainer to get to know much about the participants and the place they were coming from. “Is Radio 5 owned by Edward Lowassa?, he asked one participant from Radio 5 FM.

Most of the topics of the day were interesting, including creating training blog, definition of investigative journalism and investigative internet journalism, searching information from the internet and research assignment.

The trainer gave the first assignment for the participants to write for the blog. They were told to write about themselves following the guiding questions such as who you are, where you work, where you are this week and what are your expectations from the training.

But the most interesting part was about research on the internet tips. The trainer introduced the tips as think first before going to web, know what you are going to search for, where you might find it, are you searching for facts, simple information or background, should you google or you can find information on specific website, do you find it on the internet or can easier get the information from somewhere else, always monitor other news sites both locals and international and any other web source and always choose the right search word.

Other tips are try different google options, open pages on new tabs, add to favorites or bookmarks, follow the links, go to original sources and don’t read all but scan for what is of interest. Others include don’t ever copy paste- that is plagiarism, print if necessary; make notice on notebook and save drafts on your flash.

The trainer provided some more explanations on search tips. One of them is on how to put the site into favorites or bookmarks. He also gave example on the importance of going to original sources such as Amnesty International Reports.

It was the first day of the training. The day was cool, the training was good.  

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