By Nary Chun

On Sunday 4th November 2012, my media class went to the ASEAN BlogFest2012 conference at Build Bright University in Siem Reap. There are six students in my class and our ages range from 16 to 18. The BlogFest ran from 9:00am to 5:00pm. Teacher Diana Gross had arranged for us to leave from the Seven Candles guesthouse by bus at 8:30am. To get to the guesthouse, I had to get up at six o’clock and ride my bike for 1 hour.

Van Thearith of WikipediaKhmer

When we arrived at the university the first thing we did was to register. We ticked our name off a list and got an I.D. tags and a password to access the internet. After we registered we went to the first session which was how to connect to the internet and we logged onto wi-fi which was the first time we did this.
My media class went to the BlogFest because we wanted to know more about Facebook, websites, blogging and how to use them. This is because we really like to study media and want to be able to write a blogpost. In the future, media can help us to have a good job. All the students in the media class want to connect tothe Internet, because we want the people around the world to know us.

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The presenters were from all around Asia such as from Hong Kong, Cambodia,Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar and Malaysia. We were able to meet and talk to a Cambodian web designer. We liked to hear from him because we want to know how to build a website and after that we can use this skill to build our own. It’s important for us to have a good job and perhaps even begin our own business.

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Another session was about Wikipedia, a website where you can learn almost anything. The presenter’s name was Van Thearith. Wikipedia can help you to do homework and read history about temples in Cambodia. You find the answers easily and Wikipedia has many languages. Mr Van Ttearith spent one hour with us to show us Wikipedia Khmer. We learned about Wikipedia Khmer which will help us to research information as English is hard for us. Wikipedia Khmer is created by a group of 11 volunteers who are translating theinformation from English to Khmer. We all enjoyed the Blog-Fest very much. We learned many things. The ASEAN BlogFest 2012 was also a great opportunity to see so many technologies in one place. We learnt a lot at the Blog-Fest that will help us in the future so that we can freedom to learn. So although we cannot predict the future and we have no control over it, what we can control is now and learning media skills.

Reasey, Som Oun, Chenda, Teacher Sokha, Nary, Van Thearith, Sopha and Sen