Training ends with an Earthquake

So its the last day of training and we spent the morning researching for information for our assignment topics that we published by lunch break.
The training was wonderful and it did meet my expectations. I liked everything since most appeared new to me especially concerning blogging and better ways of searching for information on the internet.

The research assignments were challenging i believe simply because we do little writing practice from day to day as lecturers and we had been taught new ways of searching for information and we were not sure how exactly to go about the exercise.

Again we were all cautious of how our final piece will end up. We learnt that working with a deadline sure is tricky and majority swore not to give assignments ever again in their classes.
I have learnt a lot that i am going to share with my students for them to be good journalists.

After lunch an earth quake shook the place and some of us ran down stairs. Those who remained including myself were busy looking outside the windows and feeling the shake. The made fun of one of us who ran downstairs and left his wife behind!

I also received a certificate of participation-my first l should say!

Saving the Nile Perch

The Nile perch scientifically known as the Lates niloticus is a species of the fresh water fish which is widespread throughout much of the Afrotropic ecozone.
The species is native to the Congo, Nile, Senegal, Niger and in Lakes Chad, Volta, Turkana and other river basins.

It is commonly known as African snook or Victoria perch which happens to be a misleading trade name since the species is not native to Lake Victoria. We know it as Sangara in Tanzania.
The Nile Perch can grow 2 meters in length and weigh up to 200 kg but most of them are caught before they can grow this big-the reason experts say they are at risk of being extinct alongside many other species in the lake.

A research by Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute (TAFIRI) by the beginning of 2008, stated that there was an estimated 300,000 tones of Nile Perch, but in mid August 2010 the stock had dwindled dramatically by 50 percent.
The country owns 51 percent of the lake and has therefore been the leading exporter of the Nile perch fillets to the EU market for the past eight years.

The UN Foods and Agricultural Organisation once issued a strong warning of the industry collapsing if stern measures were not taken to tame the looming crisis.
There should be efforts to allow fish to breed by suspending fishing activities for a few months or introduce seasonal fishing which may appear difficult for fishing communities along the lake since majority depend on fishing activities for survival.

The reason for the decrease of fish in the lake has been cited by some fishermen as a result of illegal activities such as illegal fishing gears such as dynamite and poisons and over-fishing.
The construction of fish processing industries along the lake helped provide employment but have turned into a curse since fish are fished daily thus contributing to diminishing the stock of fish in the lake. This therefore leads to lack of employment to both individuals and industries.

In the process of saving the Nile Perch and many other species in Lake Victoria, communities can be introduced to fish farming to allow more breeding areas rather than simply depending on the lake for fish.

This will help reduce pollution in the lake and give it more space to revive its environment and breed more species.

Training Day 2

Yesterday was great as well! We discussed how to search information on the internet. We learnt that in many cases we type so many details in the search engine while a simple word can get you to the same details and give you more information. This means that at times we direct ourselves to the wrong information by typing so many words which are unnecessary. Funny was that the fastest results were from Wikipedia, yet we labeled it as not trustworthy. Fact is one needs to go to the links to get to the original source-that makes it trustworthy!

I learnt that most of our students are prone to plagiarism simply because they do not go further than the links they come across in the texts that they copy and paste from the sites they find. Majority of whom i believe have no knowledge on how to go about the links.

Minor details like choosing the right search words, opening pages in new tabs, trying different google search options, going to original sources by following links, are things most of us never took seriously but have learnt to be of importance.

The greatest part was learning how to make links in our own texts in the blogs. I never knew it was as simple as highlighting, copying and pasting the original link and clicking 'ok' that turns a word into a highlighted word!

First Day of Training

The first day of training went well! We created our own blogs. I never had one before! We discussed the many useful sites that have has changed our lives and way of doing things such as communicating, making travel plans, buying and selling, making financial transactions, catching up with the news and acquiring information.

We got to see which sites are the most used in our country and some of them shocked us. Our University, SAUT was not anywhere in the top 100! Tanzania is topped by Google, You Tube, Face Book, Yahoo and Millad Ayo-contrary to Kenya that had two media houses in the top five; Standard media and Daily Nation.

What i liked most was being able to create my own blog and writing my first post, and this will be my second! The blog gives me a feeling of a diary (personal journal) which i have been keeping for more than two decades now, just that this is a digital one.

I am not so sure what i disliked so far since all went well for a first day. I have so far learnt how i can use the internet to my advantage and to those of my students. I am looking forward to learning more concerning the internet since i am already getting ideas on how i can use my blog to write creative pieces for my students to learn and interact from.

See you soon!

My First Post

My name is Neema Rugemalira. I am an Assistant Lecturer at St. Augustine University of Tanzania- Mwanza Campus. I have been teaching since 2012. I teach Feature Writing & Editing and Writing for Public Relations to students in bachelor of Mass Communication and Public Relations and Marketing and diploma students in Journalism.

I worked for The Guardian, a local newspaper after my first degree. In the University i am in-charge of the students newspaper THE SAUT TIMES which is published each week by students who collect local news stories from around the campus and the neighboring society. I supervise them in editing the stories and doing layout. I get the paper printed and photocopied for post mortem that i supervise every Thursday.

This week i am at the Mario Mgulunde Learning Resource Center at SAUT in an Internet Training for Journalism lecturers. My expectations are to learn how to effectively use the internet to extract information for my Features Writing course and learn how to use the internet to publish articles.