Classroom Report / Day One

Reported by Kaveri Murthy

The Journalism Course was launched on Monday, April 14.
It took place at the Mylapore Times Center, in a tiny room on the second floor of the Corporation Shopping Complex in R. A. Puram.
The room was lined on one side with computers. Another consisted of cardboard boxes, all laden with goods!

Vincent D’Souza, editor of 'Adyar Times' and ' Mylapore Times' who is heading this course, gave us an orientation into the programme.
He told us about what we were going to do during the four weeks of the course.

We also got to introduce ourselves.

Participants at the course

We got our first assignment today - to map our neighborhoods.
But this was not to be done the way we usually think it is.
We were to pinpoint the major roads and streets, major stores, public places, temples and churches, hospitals, schools, etc.

Our first guest speaker on Day One was K. Satyanarayan. (He was called 'Satya' for short).

Satyanarayan is a publisher. He works at New Horizon Media at Alwarpet.

K. Satyanarayan, a guest faculty at the course

Satyanarayan was here to introduce us to the ways in which we could enrich the Internet with our contributions and how this could be done during this summer course.
The interaction was on how and why we use the Internet, the differences between the news and info on the Internet and in our daily newspapers and the advantages of the Net.
He also spoke about blogs.

Using his laptop, Satyanarayan showed us some Internet blogs and discussed their features and uses. They were churumuri.wordpress.com, citizenmatters.com, westportnow.com and maps.google.com.
The first two websites were Karnataka-based, the third was based on a small town in the US. On the last blog, he showed us a map of Chennai and made us identify the various places on it. The Adyar Bridge, Adyar River, Theosophical Society, etc.