Upskilling the youth

Today is day 3 of the ICT Journalism Workshop – Using New Media Tools in Journalism and Media, a training initiative by the Department of Communication in partnership with Highway Africa , and participants are getting more and more excited by the technology, especially those who virgins to the new media tools.

Those who did not already have blogs created their own blogs yesterday, and those with blogs pimped theirs a little further using tools we had learnt about such as creating your own online live TV stream using Ustream. Participants were also learnt started using  Twitter, RSS feeds, Google reader and Coveritlive.   

For me, being on the training side of things, I know  a lot of this technology and talk about it all the time in my line of work, but hardly have the time, or make the time, to actually use it all. I’m a regular tweeter now, which I enjoy, but even though I’m a writer I have yet to be a regular blogger. I do however follow many blogs, Baglett being one of my favourite quirky blogs about nothing too serious. I also read news blogs and columnists, but am ashamed that I have not bloggged myself. Anyway, this blog, created yesterday, is my commitment to change. 

Here is a slideshow of the participants taken with my phone:

It has also been very refreshing during this course, to see that we have more young people, early twenties even, as part of the training instead of the usual over 35 and running for 50 year olds. I find this group much more excited to learn, experiment and use these tools regularly in their work. As young working people, it is expected of us to be using these tools and coming up with new ways of doing things in the newsroom. So I believe the likelihood of the majority of the 18 people participants here, mostly under 30, using what they have learnt in this week in their work is greater than if the group was much older. A sign of the juniorization of the newsroom/work place perhaps since most of them were selected by their organisations and not by Highway Africa and there was not age restriction for entry into the course.

In a nut shell, here is to a breathe of fresh youthful air in the office!

• The ICT Journalism Workshop, 23-27 November 2009, Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies, Grahamstwon, South Africa.

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