Wednesday, March 22, 2006

PENPLUSBYTES LAUNCHES ONLINE ICT JOURNALISM COURSE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PENPLUSBYTES LAUNCHES ONLINE ICT JOURNALISM COURSE

March 21st 2006: The International Institute for ICT journalism (PenPlusBytes) has launched its first online training course titled: Introduction to ICT Journalism. The course which runs from 20th March to 20th May 2006 has attracted 43 participants from countries spread across three continents; Africa, Europe and Asia .

The course will be administered by the PenPlusBytes team and a group of international ICT Journalism experts from various parts of the world. The course has been designed to cover the fundamentals of ICT journalism for journalists with little or no experience in New Media. Employing a variety of online tools such as blogging and wikipedia, the course affords participants to have practical hands-on sessions whilst at the same time having academic insights in ICT journalism. The vision is to improve the quality of journalism through the use of ICT tools.

According to Kwami Ahiabenu II, President of PenPlusBytes the idea for undertaking this online course was born out of the need to reach a wider journalist audience with ICT Journalism training. He points out that whilst PenPlusBytes has already undertaken several ICT journalism workshops in East and West Africa for African journalists there was the need to spread the course to a much wider audience and thus the introduction of the online module. He added ' this is the pioneering online media training in ICT Journalism and we hope it would contribute in increasing the number of journalists with skills in this area'. He is optimistic that this marks a watershed in Online ICT journalism training.

The course blog is located at http://mediaictrain.blogspot.com/ with course wiki found at http://mediaictrain.pbwiki.com/ .

Participants who successfully complete the 8- week course are expected to receive a certificate from the International Institute of ICT journalism.

Ends



Notes to Editors

The International Institute for Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Journalism (PenPlusBytes) is a registered company limited by guarantee since 18th July 2001. It seeks to empower the media through the use of ICTs to advance the work of journalism. Since its inception the organisation has trained numerous Journalists across the globe.

Contact Address

Website: www.penplusbytes.net