This past weekend Rlabs hosted a group of moms to do the first practical for the mom3.0 social media for social change session 2010. This is one of the community projects in the Lab which is facilitated by Terence Hendricks one of last year’s graduates.  These moms are very keen to learn new skill and 19 of the ladies arrived at  RLab. This is a much bigger group than last year so we making some adjustments to have two sessions to accommodate these ladies that is passionate about learning new skills.

This week’s session was about “What is an E-mail” and doing the practical where the moms created their gmail accounts. This is going to be a great experience for me to see how these ladies is going to grow in their typing and computer skills. At the moment majority of them cannot type and are not comfortable using the mouse. Well done ladies you did very well today.

Don’t wait for something big to occur. Start where you are, with what you have, and that will always lead you into something greater.
– Mary Manin Morrissey

Social Media Factory Members will soon be part of an exciting initiative where RLabs and Social Media Factory will be collaborating with the Mobenzi team. Social Media Factory is a RLabs initiave where we use local community members who have been introduced and trained in Social Media to be part of our service offering. The Social Media Factory seemed to be a perfect fit for Mobenzi as its basic idea is to create employment and give people an opportunity to earn a basic income using their mobile phones as a business tool. This is one of the few big projects that the RLabs and Social Media Factory have instore over the nex few weeks. You can read more about it here.

Today learners from Hanover Park came for Social Media training with RLabs that will be hosted over the next 2 days. Ten learners who are in need of job readiness skills were introduced to basic social media skills, email, Google Docs, information searching and gathering, filesharing sites, blogging and micro-blogging. This is a continuous effort by RLabs to take Social Media skills to local communities and to empower citizens with how it could be used in their everyday life and work environment.

After two consecutive years of social media for social change training under the umbrella of Rlabs, this past weekend they launched the 2010 social media for social change sessions. This is the 3rd year of training happening together withImpact Direct and CPUT. For 2008 -2009 Rlabs trained more than 70 men, women and teens on the platform of social media. The launch for 2010 social media for social change sessions 17 people signed up to join the mom3.0 and the reconstructed sessions this year.

2008:

This was the first year when Marlon Parker took a gamble to take ex-drug addicts and ex-gangsters into the Lab at CPUT to teach them computer skills in a undisciplined way which was social media. Something that I have to highlight we knew nothing about computers besides knowing how to steal them. Later in the year Rlabs launched the mom2.0 this was house wives of the community which did the same training (social media for social change).

2009:

The intake of 2009 mom2.0 and the reconstructed sessions was facilitated by a team of the 2008 graduates remember they knew nothing about computers and social media but they managed to take them through to graduating the end of December 2009.

2010:

A very interesting year again a team of 2009 graduates will manage the sessions. This year’s sessions will be more spiced up the training will not only be manage in the Rlabs it will be more practical where the students will go into the community, malls, mountain and  beaches to take video clips and pics and do their stories around that.

As a graduate of 2008 I’m a witness how champions are being developed through this Rlabs project. A message to these years’ students if you know nothing about computers and social media you are a perfect candidate of becoming a great champion for the community

Something new and fresh has aroused for me this week. I had the opportunity to play a directors role for a movie shoot at Impact Direct / Rlabs. Nathan Thys who is a filmmaker and working in the British film industry for a few years, who did a workshop with us on movie making. We started 8am and ended 9pm, during this time, we did the introduction to movie making, movie shoot and editing.
Each of us had to come up with a movie idea (story) which we pitched to the team, and who voted for two best movie ideas, that we had to shoot at the end of the day. The first vote went to Clinton Liederman a comedy of a man who was locked out of his house half naked and had to jump the walls of the neighbour to get into the house. The other vote went to Terence Hendricks, a thriller story of a girl that was sold to gangsters.
One of the projects in the Rlabs space is the Social Media Events where we will do the live blogging, twitter, flickr, zoopy, youtube etc. and give our client a copy of a edited cut dvd video of the event we have taken on that day and this is where the movie making workshop will come into play. The team got enough skill to do a great film shoot.