Today was my first day of school! Well, not quite. It’s more like pre-school. In order to ensure that all Master of Journalism students are on the same technical page, so to speak, we’re all obliged to take a three-credit, one-week “technical bootcamp.” It consists of six sessions, six hours each, in which we learn the basics of new media like blogging, RSS feeds, editing photos, recording video and so forth. It’s Blogging 101, as Laine put it.
So guess what we did today? We spent six hours learning how to blog with WordPress. We were also taught how to use a wiki. Six hours. In a stunning feat of creativity, I created a blog called Social Club. No, really — take a look.
At least it’s a good opportunity to meet people. Most people in the program are from mainland China, a few are local HK people, there’s a handful of whiteys from the US, UK and Australia, one Chinese-American guy from LA and a Chinese-Canadian girl who went to McGill. (Huzzah!) I sat next to a nice girl from Virginia who has done some video work for C-SPAN and CNN and over the lunch break I met a guy from England who fell for Hong Kong a couple of years ago when he was here on exchange. During the class I exchanged emails and blog comments with some other people, and of course we all read each other’s blogs, which is totally weird because now I feel like I know these people despite never having met them. And yet we were all in the same room together for several hours.
Tomorrow we’ll be taking photos, editing them in Photoshop and putting them on our blogs. I can’t wait.
Cool! Are they also going to teach you online social networks?!
you should introduce those fools to geosense chatroom. unless that what cedric meant by ‘online social network’.
zomg! I saw a Laine lookalike tonight when I ate at this new ramen noodles place! All the way to the boyfriend who kinda looked like a Mediterranean version of you (if you stretch it a little lot).