With the Highway Africa conference happening as you are reading this, now seems like the perfect time to be teaching people how to use the media that is available to them.
With the Highway Africa conference happening as you are reading this, now seems like the perfect time to be teaching people how to use the media that is available to them.
Highway Africa is the biggest gathering of African journalists in the world, with 701 journalists attending the conference in 2007. Journalists and other members of the media industry are gathering in Grahamstown from across the continent to learn more about new technologies in media and their uses in the industry. And their uses are many – you just need to know how to use them. This is what Peter Verweij intends to show the journalism students who are attending the conference as part of the Future Journalists Programme (FJP).
As the co-ordinator for the programme Moagisi Letlhaku explains, the FJP provides a training ground for young journalists. Letlhaku says that Highway Africa is the "big finale" for the programme, as it is the last of three sessions that the students have been attending throughout the year. Not only will the students gain a great deal of experience from covering the conference in the Highway Africa blog, but Letlhaku sees this as a "huge networking and employment opportunity".
Verweij, who is a lecturer for the School of Journalism at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, will be teaching the FJP participants more than just the basics of blogs. Instead, he will be teaching them about new technologies in blogging such as CoveritLive and Qik.
CoveritLive does more than just provide users with a blogging space. It continually updates pages, so that any questions or comments will come through to the blogger as they are asked. Qik allows you to take a video with your cellphone and have it instantly appear on the website. Verweij believes that both these technologies will be particularly useful when covering a conference.
Though the technologies may sound slightly daunting to an outsider, Verweij guarantees that "it is not so difficult". "Everyone knows how to use a blog," he says. However, he says that this technology will "make it a bit livelier."
