On Wednesday, the third plenary session of the DW Global Media Forum focused on education as the milestone for sustainable development. Denis Goldberg, a social activist from Cape Town, South Africa, argued, “The focus of education should shift to sustainability because we depend on it.” Doing so requires taking action on issues including overpopulation. One of his suggestions for limiting population growth was expanding social safety nets. By doing so, people move away from the idea that having children is the only way to ensure a stable future.

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After having spent three days at the Global Media Forum, my feelings remind me of those after a class trip or a big festival: I’m very exhausted but at the same time all wound up.

Emmy, María, and I have already talked a little about the discussions and workshops we participated in. Our entries show how different the workshops were. Some topics actually appeared to be too complex to be discussed in depth within 90 minutes. But I’ve got a lot of food for thought out of all of them; I’ve discovered new organizations, approaches and people. For example, the pupils Isabelle van der Valk and Hendrik Rösler who go to the Christophorus School for physically impaired children in Bonn. Their school organizes an awesome exchange program with a Tunisian school for kids with handicaps. This program enables the German students, on the one hand, to smell the salty air of the Mediterranean and the Tunisians, on the other hand, to see Germany at least once in their life.

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I have spent three days now at the Global Media Forum. I have met the other bloggers, I have made new friends and met old friends from all over the world. I have eaten and even danced during the famous GMF boat ride on the Rhine River. So besides the serious side of the conference, there is also a fun part to it.

One of my areas of interest as a trained journalist and as a trainer of people in media is the influence of the advancing digital world on journalism. That’s why I attended a workshop organized by the DW Akademie with the title: New Trainers for New Media? Challenges for Human Resources Development in Media Support in a Fast-Changing Media Landscape.

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The Global Media Forum started on Monday with plenary session 1: “Rating vs. Quality: Media caught between market pressure and the mission to educate.” It was a very engaging discussion, and there were representatives from the US, Germany, Russia and South Africa. Above all, participant Trevor Ncube made a particular impression on me. He is deputy chairman of M&G Media Ltd in South Africa and chairman of Alpha Media Holdings in Zimbabwe, and he started by saying that when the media neglects Africans, it is generating misinformation.

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As Maria noted in her last entry, she believes the social dialogue in Argentina is heading the wrong way – and it seems that every country faces such points in its development. As I look back on my university years, I agree with her.

Sometimes there is too much talking and not enough real action (I don’t just mean the educational sphere only; it can be noticed in all of Russian economic or political life). With all due respect to the talented and brilliant professors and teachers of previous generations who helped several Russian geniuses (mathematician Grigori Perelman, for example) to reveal their potential, I would like to see changes in educational life.

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Wow! I’ve found the Global Media Forum really interesting so far. The first thing that stood out to me was the diversity on display – people from lots of different countries mix at the conference, some in suits, some more casual or in business wear. There are lots of colorful dresses, men from Africa in robes and women in headscarves. The clothing is just an outer signal of how many cultures are represented here. And in the middle of it all are my fellow bloggers and me.

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So far the conference has been interesting. I attended one of the workshops dealing with fun ways to learn, hosted by the Deutsche Welle Learning By Ear (LBE) program. I think the LBE program offers a great way to learn using formats such as features and radio dramas. I have attended the Global Media Forum two times before, and I found this particular workshop very entertaining. Normally the workshops consist mainly of PowerPoint presentations and talks. In this workshop, we watched one of the radio plays scenes being dramatized live just so the audience could get a taste of how the plays are conceived – although of course they are mostly radio/audio.

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This is my last entry before we will all be writing from the Global Media Forum in Bonn (Germany). I was shocked to hear that Hellgurd’s entries will not be published any more due to the severe threats he received. It made me go back to the very beginning of the project and look at Hellgurd’s video presentation. He speaks of music as a universal language that can bridge the differences among people.

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Last weekend and the beginning of this week have been fascinating. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, before I started to write these blogs if the work I do had anything to do with education, I would have answered with a strong no. I would have mentioned that I train youth in media skills and that I also work with an educational foundation that helps develop solar light capacity in schools. Of course, these activities have everything to do with education. Writing for this blog has highlighted this rather obvious fact to me.

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Reading Maria’s entry where a teachers’ strike was discussed made me think about dissatisfaction with the Russian education system – both from teachers and others.

What surprises and worries me most is that our teachers never organize strikes or try to make their voices be heard. It happens neither in small cities nor in big ones. I know that most of our university professors do some tutoring or give private lessons throughout the year to earn additional money (for example, before high school students enter a university, their parents often find somebody to give a term-training course to prepare a teenager for the entrance examination). I think a collective demand for better salaries or modern equipment is reasonable – it might result in improving the situation in the whole region (or even several regions), and it is not about giving benefits to any single teacher.

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