Training on Tuesday morning started at 08:30 with an over-view of what we were going to do during the day by Mr. Justin, the lead trainer. The first thing that was shown to us was a video, which was about mash-up. Now what we must be wondering is: what this mash up thing is about? The content of that video was basically a song which was composed of different singers singing a song, but it was like pieces of the songs were taken from somewhere and were fitted together (without changing anything), so that the final result would appear as a single song. We must agree on the fact that the song was a pretty nice one to listen to and all the participants seemed to be enjoying it.
After the mash-up video, blogging was introduced to us. Mr. Justin explained about the purpose of having a blog, how we can blog and what are the problems linked with blogging. All participants who did not have a Blogger/Twitter account were asked to create one. The blog account was created on “Blogger” as this was the simplest one to use for blogging.
The flow of this part of the training was that it was shown to us step by step how to create the account, how to choose a proper name for the blog and the importance of having a proper display name as this will appear next to all the posts that have been published. After all these had been done, we learned about how to write a post, put tags in it and how the blog would appear after publishing it. We then moved to the part where we learned about how to design the blog, add gadgets like search box, feeds, followers etc. It was also shown to us how to download a template for Blogger on different websites and what was the difference between XML and HTML. Looking for a nice template for our blog could take a lot of time as most of the templates are not free, and as Mr. Justin said, “Good things don’t come cheap”! By that time everyone was ready for lunch, but before that we were shown how to add gadgets to the blog, edit posts that were already published, add links to it, and customize the blog by going on the “settings” part.
After lunch, we moved to the afternoon session in which we did the debate that was supposed to be done on Friday as there was a problem with the internet connection, which prevented us to continue the training on Facebook. Mr. Ken Lohento, our programme coordinator, explained that CTA deals mainly with dissemination of information on agriculture and rural development. According to him, most of the people who are engaged in agriculture are old and CTA has invested in this project as youth are the key factor in applying ICT in agriculture and rural development.
A summary was done on the forum that we had on the “youth group” in January and February 2011, which was on two themes:
- How states in ACP countries are developing ICTs?
- Young entrepreneurs using ICTs: What they are doing and what are the challenges they are facing?
The presentation in French was done by Inoussa Traore from Burkina Faso and that in English was done by Samantha-Kaye Christie from Jamaica. The facilitator for this session was Tyrone Hall, the overall winner of the essay contest, who is also from Jamaica.
After the presentations, we moved to the debate part, where the participants had to react on the presentations which were on:
- Infrastructure
- Energy
- Prospect in agriculture – opportunities for youth
- Goal of the States
Reactions were from the following people:
Riten Chand Gosai from Fiji
Chris /mwangi Ngige
Loeto Ronald Kenosi from Botswana
Issac Chanda from Zambia
Aristide Adaha from Benin
Tyrone Hall from Jamaica
Akaffou Euphrem N’Depo from Ivory Coast
Inoussa Traore from Burkina Faso
Moustapha Waly Diouf from Senegal
Gerald Mangena from Zimbabwe
After the debate, which was very entertaining, there was tea break and by that time the internet problem was solved and the participants who had not been able to create a Blogger/Twitter account were asked to do so and the training was over at 18:00.
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| Training at CSIR on Tuesday 8th March 2011 |
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