Sign-up for Kjourn.net accounts is now available for students participating in relevant courses. Please follow the instructions provided in class to create your account.

Edit: To discourage spammers, I have turned off account creation. If you are a student in one of my courses and still need to set up an account (or if you are having problems with your account), please speak with me directly.

Dear students: If you are trying to create an account on the kjourn site, you must be a student in one of the classes I teach using the site.

Sign-up has already been done in class. However, if you missed that class, here's what you must do:  read more »

(Warning: this is a rant.)

Sometimes I hate to be connected. For some people, the more "connected" you are, the better. They've got cell phones (yes, more than one), pagers, laptops, email, social networking, and on and on. I'm told they are "hyper-connected."

The funny thing is, it's impossible sometimes to communicate with the hyper-connected. Every conversation gets interrupted by a ring, a beep, or a buzz in the pocket. They start another conversation, or begin typing away at little keyboards, and there they go, off on another train of thought. Buh-bye!  read more »

Congratulations go to KIMEP journalism student Kairzhan Yegizbayev, who won second prize in the neweurasia.net Best Central Asian Blog 2007 competition. The award was based on Kairzhan's Kazakh weblog, which he runs using Wordpress. Good job, Kairzhan!

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) sponsored a February 25 roundtable in Astana where Kazakhstani government officials, non-governmental organizations, media representatives and others met to discuss the law on mass media currently being developed in Kazakhstan.

An announcement of the event posted on the OSCE website includes a link to an OSCE-commissioned analysis of the draft law.

From J-Lab and the Knight Citizen News Network, this book by Mark Briggs is called "a digital literacy guide for the information age." The chapters offer basic technical instructions for online journalism tools including blogging, audio, video, and more. Download the free PDF or order a print copy.

Guardian Weekly website.

"Oil and gas are proving as much a burden as a benefit to Central Asia. The three oil and gas producers in the region – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – are showing signs of the “resource curse” under which energy-rich nations fail to thrive or develop distorted, unstable economies. Geography and their history in the Soviet Union have bound them to Russia, through which most of their energy exports must be transported. Moscow is proving to be an unreliable partner for foreign consumers as it has been willing to cut off pipelines to apply commercial or political pressure.  read more »