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The awarenet Peace Song Collection CD is out and distributed to all the participants of the project. The VSA organised a launch party to celebrate the event appropriately and thank everyone wholeheartedly who was involved in the awarenet theme song project.

Terri-Lynn Penney organised the event (Fr, 1/2/13 at Nombulelo SS hall) and invited awarenet users, teachers, other NGOs in Grahamstown and the press.The crowd was excited, music was played and everyone danced and mingled. During the ceremony, a speech was given by Terri-Lynn Penney. She also played the songs and showed the music video by Mary Waters HS. Then, CDs were given out to all involved in the project.

Learners from VG High School with their copy of the CD. Copyright: Stephen Penney, Grocott’s Mail

During the course of the project, an independent HipHop group formed at Nyaluza PSS called Teen Legacy. They were also given the chance to perform for everyone and showed off what they had learned since then, followed by Inyaniso, the senior HipHop band that taught the awarenet learners last year how to perform and rap. Everything was very exciting, the launch a great success!

The project will be repeated this year, starting after the Arts Festival in July to bring learners on stage and perform on Peace Day, 21/09/13. Contact us if you would like to participate with your friends or your learners!

This week, the VSA will officially release the awarenet Peace Song Compilation CD in South Africa with a big Release Party in Grahamstown. The event will take place on Friday 1/2/13 at 2.30 pm at Nombulelo Hall in Joza. Invited is everyone who took part in the awarenet Peace Song Project in 2012 and a few more interested and new awarenet users, and of course partners and stakeholders.

The CD was produced after a HipHop Project on awarenet, during which learners wrote an performed their own songs on Peace Day 21/9/12. They will now perform again live on stage, and everyone will receive their own CD to take home.

Please, contact us, if you are interested in this event and would like to get to know the VSA’s work with and around awarenet better. This will be a great opportunity to see our learners in action.

The VSA has received a generous donation by an overseas member to produce another 100 awarenet Peace Song Collection CDs. This means that every participant in the awarenet Peace Song Project will receive their own copy, and the rest can be used for advertising our programme and hopefully to attract more funding to repeat the project next year.

We are planning to hand out the CDs during an official release party for awarenet users and partners. The party will probably take place at the beginning of the next school year in one of the halls in Joza. We will inform you once we know more and you are welcome to contact us if you would like to be invited. In the mean time we would like to thank the donor whole hardheartedly!

Today is Peace Day! Exactly one year ago, the awareNet Peace Day Concert happened in Grahamstown, South Africa, in partnership with Peace One Day, who will tonight give another huge Global Truce 2012 Concert in London, UK.

Subsequently, Corinne Cooper and Lunga Heleni from Sonic Art Studio recorded all 5 schools’ songs about Peace and Roderich Zipp from Sota Productions directed the music video for the winner of the best song: Mary Waters High School. Today, we release the CD and we are proud to be a Peace One Day partner again and to present such amazing young people who want to share their vision with you and the world!

Our original plan was to repeat the awareNet Song Competition Project and organise the next concert for this year’s Peace Day, but the lack of funding destroyed our plans. You can support us by buying a CD or investing in the awareNet programme, so that the project can be repeated for next year’s Peace Day – a step towards a better and more peaceful world, towards better educated and happier children.

Believe us, they are proud and happy to be part of such a project, because they experience how their voices can be heard!

Are you aware yet?

This blog provides more information to the music CD The awareNet Peace Song Collection 2011, which will be published soon.

The challenge – write a theme song for awareNet

Popular music culture is big amongst the youth worldwide – in Grahamstown East the Rap and Hip Hop music forms are particularly popular ways in which the youth express their hopes, joys, fears and frustrations of daily life. In July 2011, Anna Wertlen, with Corinne Cooper, Lunga Heleni and the local HipHop group Inyaniso, visited schools in Grahamstown East to present the VSA’s new awareNet project.

We put the idea out there that awareNet needed a theme song and invited five groups of learners to write the lyrics and develop the music in the studio. Corinne Cooper, who owns a music studio in Grahamstown, and Lunga Heleni, a professional recording artist, assisted with the project on an entirely voluntary basis. Their role was to help tap into the learner’s hidden talents and give them a good grounding in the skills required for writing, creating, performing and recording music. With a small window of eight weeks the challenge was on, and at the end of it they would perform in front of their peers and community at the awareNet Peace Day Celebrations in September 2011 in conjunction with PeaceOneDay.

The process – training the young musicians

The process was entirely voluntary with learners who had an interest in music committing themselves to the project. Every week we visited the five schools – Benjamin Mahlasela SS, Nombulelo SS, Mary Waters HS, Nathanial Nyaluza PSS and Victoria Girls HS – and helped the learners with their choice of words, rhyming and scansion, as well as educated them about the important difference between underground and commercial forms of rap, the former of which tends to be more subversive and the latter which is rap in its more popular form and which sells. They were also taught performance techniques for their debut on the music stage. They grand prize the young musicians were aiming for was to have their song recorded.

The broad aim of the project was to demonstrate not only how literacy skills are important for self-expression, but also how opinions and feelings can be shared through popular culture, performance, and later through a variety of social networking applications. At first meeting we discovered learners who knew little more about the process of transferring knowledge other than to be passive receivers of the information being shared with them. Slowly, over the two months there was a noticeable shift in attitude and they began to actively participate and gain the confidence to begin sharing their own ideas. And so the awareNet theme song project came to life. The learner’s confidence grew to such an extent that they began to start up their own things and at Nyaluza PSS, where the school system literally fails the children, the learners even started their own band and began writing their own lyrics.

Many of the learners who attend the awareNet social networking workshops have very little idea of what to do on a social network. An important focus of our workshops is to combine real-life issues experienced by these learners with their computer work in order to demonstrate how technology is of relevance in the real world and not just a skill to be acquired. This approach enhances their passion for the computer and its abilities and it begins to makes sense to them to know how to read and write, which is the basic skill underpinning the necessary tools for operating a computer.

Making music and social commentary

To start the process of writing the lyrics, the learners were given just a few ideas – such as awareness, peace and your life – and the songs that were inspired by each group were remarkably unique. The Mahlasela group portrayed their school and their lives in their community; Nombulelo wrote about the drug problem at their school; Mary Waters were visionaries and wrote about crime and war; the Nyaluza group used religion as their departure point; and the Victoria Girls group were about self-esteem in a world where social norms in terms of body image put a lot of pressure on the youth.

With the help of a young professional music artist, Gabriel Spilkin, to get the right backing for their lyrics, four out of the five school groups made their own melody while the fifth chose rap as their main musical medium. The end products were five startlingly relevant songs containing social commentary written by the learners that would convey a heartfelt message to their communities at the Peace Day celebrations.

The awareNet workshops are all about computer skills, reading and writing, and most importantly community outreach – and this was a project that spoke directly to our aim to inspire social change by encouraging communities to think about education differently. The five groups of learners had directly experienced how education can occur outside of the school too; and we had realised our aim to encourage the learners to take ownership of their own education, believe in their ability to lead their peers, and to help us create a system of champions of change in their communities.

At the awareNet Peace Day celebrations in September the crowd’s response made it clear that the Mary Water’s group of three rap artists took the prize for the music video. However, we felt that all five groups had grown in so many ways, not least in stature as leaders amongst their peers. Generous sponsorship from Makana Municipality for the hiring of the venue, music equipment, transport and recording has allowed us to record all five songs for this CD.

And, to fittingly crown the success of the awareNet theme song project, we are pleased to announce that the ECSPIRT Project made it into the second round at the 2012 Impumelelo Social Innovations Awards – watch this space to see our progress into the final rounds.

More about awareNet

awareNet allows the creation of student communities in a safe, rich environment that spans the digital divide. This is free, open source software that has the potential to bring learners all over the world together in a collaborative learning experience, thereby expanding young people’s worlds beyond the confines of their local communities. .

A unique feature of awareNet is that it allows the creation of a single social network that brings the network to its users, instead of expecting them to come to the full Internet, which is too expensive for the majority of the many potential users in Africa. awareNet can be hosted locally within a mesh, allowing a large number of servers worldwide, all of which may only have intermittent access to each other. This allows participants to use rich technologies (multimedia) in collaborative projects with other learners anywhere in the Internet. Responses may be delayed, but they are at least enabled.

Learners on a mesh network or a LAN can make use of the broadband Internet to produce strong local content (including videos, their own music, and picture galleries) and share it overnight with learners in the rest of the world.

awareNet is being developed further in close cooperation with the learners to adapt its functionality precisely to their needs while they learn basic computer skills. This method particularly motivates the learners to cooperate in a focused manner, because changes are visible immediately. New insights into the perceptions of young African users may make awareNet a highly popular tool, helping bring Africa onto the Internet and making generations of young Africans more aware of our global community.

We believe that we can make this system work through the funding we receive to employ mediators from the community who are already thinking about education differently. NGOs such as Masifunde Learner Development and IkamvaYouth already have their local champions who are willing to share their knowledge. We aim to encourage such NGOs to use awareNet to learn how to use social networking to share tools such as educational videos for learners and lesson plans for teachers.

We are proud to announce that the video clip for the awareNet theme song was shot last weekend by Roderich Zipp.

The learners from Mary Waters HS and winners of the HipHop song competition last Peace Day worked very well together and truly had fun, even though it was a long and tiring day, which started at sunrise and only ended long after sunset. They were all well prepared thanks to a number of preceding meetings in which they discussed the content, the style, and their ideas and opinions about peace and awareness. Mr Zipp took care to respect their ideas and inspired them to think bigger and better.

We expect the music video to be ready to publish in two or three weeks. Watch this space to find out where you can see it first!

The VSA is an official partner of Peace One Day. POD is building the biggest call for peace the world has ever seen. Each year, 21 September marks Peace Day; a day for wide-scale community action, and a day for UN agencies and aid organisations to safely carry out life-saving work.

This year on Peace Day, we have organised a music event in Grahamstown, South Africa, that combined education, fun, communication and practical skills, all on awareNet. Subsequently, we made a video about the run up to the event (watch on YouTube), which POD liked so much that they have featured it on their official website. Have a look at their Global Truce 2012 partners, the VSA is listed under NGO&INGOs and the short film can be watched under Youth&Education.

We see this project as a pilot and want to repeat it next year for Global Truce!

As we mentioned in a previous blog, the Makana Municipality sponsored the awareNet-Peace-Celebration on Peace Day, at which five schools from Grahamstown competed for the best HipHop song about Peace. This gives us the opportunity to record every of the five songs professionally to produce a CD. The CD will help us to publizise awareNet better and to attract funding for future projects.

Last week, the recording has started, and again, sincere thanks go to Corinne Cooper and Lunga Heleni from Sonic Art Studio for all their passionate and voluntary work, commitment and input. The learners all tried very hard to give their best and left the studio very proud and richer with another great experience, made possible by the VSA.

This recording is further the basis of the music clip that will be produced with the winner of the best song of the competition: Mary Waters High School. We have already started meeting with the MW learners on a regular basis to work out the concept for the video. The shooting will start after the end year exams are finished.

The VSA published a short film about the music event on Peace Day. Have a look at the outcome of our wonderful project, in which learners from 5 schools in Grahamstown learned how to use computers and the Internet, how to write HipHop lyrics and perform them on stage in only 2 months.

Please, watch this video on YouTube.

All of this could not have been possible without our partners: eKhaya ICT, Sonic Art Studio, Inyaniso and Peace One Day. Thank you for the fantastic collaboration!

We had a fantastic music event at Peace Day yesterday, here in Grahamstown-South Africa! We celebrated Peace and awareNet with great HipHop music that was composed especially for this event. It took us only 2 months to get five groups together and train them to perform their own song in the contest while they learned how to use computers and the Internet in a productive and creative manner.

In the beginning, we showed Jeremy Gilley’s short movie about Peace One Day to give everyone the background about our cooperation. Then, there was a motivational message from Sakhile Moleshe, a musician who also grew up in the Eastern Cape and is now an international celebrity. We had great guest artists: Inyaniso, the Boys in Motion, Keegan Too Chilled Prince and Roddy Zipp. The judges, Erika Wertlen from Left2Write, Jared Lang and the latter two guest artists who all took their duty very seriously. And last but not least the prizes for the best song (Mary Waters High School: professional music video), best rapper (Benjamin Mahlasela SS: head phones and an Inyaniso CD) and best singers (also MWHS: Inyaniso CDs), sponsored by SonicArtStudio, the Makana Municipality, well and us. We even had to quickly hand out an additional certificate for the best group who showed us true heart and peaceful awareness: Victoria Girls High School. Thank you all for putting so much energy, money and passion into the training, songs and judging! You were fantastic!

We loved all the songs so much that we decided that they will all be recorded. We will make an awareNet Peace Day album and turn this into a new tradition here in Grahamstown. Watch out for more next year on Peace Day, 21/09/12, the Day of Global Truce!