Participants worldwide congregated to celebrate and acknowledge South Africa’s 10th year of Democracy, by interacting and sharing their thoughts and experiences on Freedom.
The DOE vision was to establish a user friendly ICT facility for learners from all walks of life to debate the meaning of freedom and how it relates to their lives. Ten South African learners from each province were brought to Cape Town in 2003 for a pilot, and to the Johannesburg Apartheid Museum in 2004 for an international four day interactive education programme.
The Freedom Day Online Learning Programme comprised of a number of exciting components which enabled participants to collaborate by leveraging an extensive range of technologies.
The online learning centre
The educational gateway was designed to challenge and empower both first-time and advanced computer users through Alchemy’s experience in innovative web and graphic design. Instrumental in the collaboration effort was an interactive web portal which encompassed a substantial feature set including online interactive chat rooms, games and surveys. A personalized shared document repository was provided enabling participants to share their own thoughts, poems, sound clips, photos, and hand drawn pictures with participants world-wide.
Participants registered online, and were dynamically allocated their own cyber partner from a foreign country which motivated individual creativity and participation. Uganda, Namibia, Sweden, Jordan, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Nigeria, Mali, Pakistan and Ghana partnered in the event. Content relating to the partner countries, including socio-economic, political, educational and cultural profiles, was researched and presented within the educational gateway.
The educational experience centre
Alchemy used clinical precision to rapidly transform a vacant location at the Apartheid Museum into a sophisticated educational experience centre, including a temporary network of 120 machines. Rigid time-frames needed to be adhered to to coincide with the Freedom Day event.
The video production
Alchemy coordinated a series of international video conference between South Africa and six of the partner countries, providing the platform for a meaningful, real-time debate on Freedom and Education. Young South African ambassadors from diverse backgrounds were hand-picked to represent South Africa to share their thoughts on topics such as AIDS, language, war and cultural stereotypes. There were huge challenges in setting up a reliable and professional video conference infrastructure and sourcing personnel in some of the countries.
The footage captured during the video conferences by camera teams in each country was professionally edited and presented as a showcase at the Minister’s Event which included Apartheid Hearings and a keynote address by Kader Asmal.