Women’s Forum Social Correspondents: Trained

This past weekend was a big one: Bailey and I worked with the folks at Women’s Forum to put on a blogging and social media training for six new social correspondents. As I described earlier here, these new social correspondents will be writing articles on their own blogs, to be picked up and published by Women’s Forum. Our project even got picked up in the news, if with a little bit of misinformation:

The project office reports that master classes were delivered on 23 and 25 July by journalist Liya Bayramova, entrepreneur Nigar Kocharli, psychologist Javad Effendi and blogger Farid Sadikhova-Buyuran. Trainees were selected from 56 candidates who submitted their applications and passed individual interviews. During the training course the young authors were suggested to get acquainted with the basics of web-journalism, develop writing skills, work in a team, and create their own blogs. Immediately after graduation, they will start to work as social correspondents. Their functions will include continuous updating of blogs with fresh articles, coverage of critical social issues and their promotion in domestic Internet.

I’m not sure who was delivering master’s level classes, and I’m not sure who graduated either. That must have been another Women’s Forum Social Correspondent training. There were some writing sessions and we gave out certificates, though.

After discussing blog writing and blog layouts and how to build online communities, we talked about their plans going forward. Because the program itself continues through December, Bailey and I will be mentors for the bloggers, meeting with them regularly to make sure things stay on track and they continue to improve their writing and their blogs, overall.

I do have just one specific observation about the training: I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of a training that was conducted in three languages – Azerbaijani, English, and Russian. We didn’t really plan it out that way. Instead, Bailey and I just did the training in English because all of our trainees were good English speakers. The guest speakers spoke Russia, Azeri, or English based on their preference and the preference of the group. One of them was changing languages after almost every question, depending on in which language the question was asked. That was bizarre. Cool, but bizarre.

For a slideshow of some pictures from the training, see below.

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