Quick - what are the top most important topics for journalism education to be teaching today?

If you're South African, you might want to say - in the light of recent belligerent comments from those in power - it is this: "How to make a case for media freedom and self-regulation." You wouldn't be wrong.

African journalism educators are not the easiest constituency to construct into a community. Nothing wrong with them as people! The challenges come from their jobs in general - and the particular conditions of African j-schools (dispersed, under-resourced, divided by language and country, etc).

But a major reason why Rhodes pitched for, and won, the hosting status for the World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) over 5-7 July, 2010, is to help overcome these obstacles. We're convinced that all of us across the continent benefit from networking.

We just hosted 20 African j-schools, a couple of others (US, UK, Australia), and a handful of donors. I wrote a column on the significance of it all, so not to repeat it here. There are also interesting recommendations that came out of the meeting.

What’s worth adding is:

Some interesting comments on the Declaration adopted at the World Journalism Education Congress in Singapore last month:

US j-teacher Carol Ames has summarised our syndicate discussions at the WJEC-AMIC conference on how to get journ-education digitalised. Two nice points:

"How do we prepare our students for whichever version of the “new” media they will be expected to use to produce interesting stories or compelling content? And more importantly, how do we first prepare ourselves?"