Next week will see the culmination of a project that Telkom commissioned the Department of Journalism at Rhodes University to develop, in celebration of the role telecommunications has played in SA`s first 10 years of democracy.
The project, entitled "10 Years of Dialogue", is a multimedia Web site that includes audio, video, text, animation and graphics, and is pitched at a youthful audience, as it is interactive and contains historical facts.
"In the past 10 years, Telkom has helped people and businesses to talk, and without talking, you cannot have a true democracy," says Hans van de Groenendaal, senior corporate communications specialist at Telkom.
He says the Web site will serve as an added platform to highlight Telkom`s achievements over the past decade.
The scope of the project required students from journalism and computer disciplines to work together, and provided the students an opportunity to develop a wider knowledge base than the chosen discipline.
According to design lecturer Brian Garman, the challenge was to develop multimedia content that could be viewed over relatively narrow band access to the Internet.
"Multimedia is a very powerful medium - it is something that has, for example, the ability to put newspapers back into the breaking news game," says Garman.
"It can also provide television with a tool for more in-depth reporting than the standard sound bites one usually gets on TV news. It also has the potential to turn radio into an audio-visual medium."
Garman says the beauty of multimedia lies in the fact that it provides a platform for experimentation, since it is a new medium and there is still much to be learned about what it can do.
"We are busy making new rules, developing new ways to tell stories and constructing new narrative structures, which is great," he says.
"I believe the next step is for the university to begin driving great ideas that can be spun off into industry, rather than us learning from what the industry does all the time."
The Web site goes live on Wednesday, 11 August and can be accessed through www.telkom.co.za.
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