Idea Lab

On Sunday April 13th, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) and Juntos will graduate a second round of twelve students from an English Speaking video and web workshop.

The graduation will take place at Songhai City Cultural Center at 3117 Master Street in Philadelphia at 3pm. Like their counterparts from the previous Spanish speaking workshop, members of this class learned web skills, video-making skills and media literacy. In the course of the 8-week workshop these students actually completed three five-minute pieces, which will be screened at Sunday's graduation.

The second round of classes was made up of a mixture of immigrants and low-wage workers across the city--from Togo and India to Morocco and Philadelphia--and the class included taxi drivers, nurses, teachers and security guards. Students in the class will also be receiving free wireless Internet for the year as well as computers and the skills necessary to utilize the web through MMP's digital inclusion project and Wireless Philadelphia. The aim here is to offer the workshop participants, both the skills as well as the tools necessary to be cultural producers in the digital age.

Finally, we will be launching an innovative website in May which will be a vital compliment to the classes. The website, will be a mixture of a blog and social networking site, utilizing the Drupal content management platform. The site will be focused on the videos and stories members of this class create and will be a place for them to claim ownership on the web.