American Baptist College recently had its first online activism class, “Community Organizing 101 in Cyberspace.”
Community Organizing 101 in Cyberspace is about preparing students to be digital activist. The class teaches students community organizing strategies through social media tools.
The class also examines the arguments regarding the effectiveness of on-the-ground social protest in comparison to online activist movements.
Through learning social media tools like Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, students learned several essential skills that will help them launch an online campaign to bring issue awareness to a problem of social injustice.
In order to situate the new media training’s, the class discussed traditional forms of community organizing as well as discussed four case studies of online community organizing (e.g. Trayvon Martin, 2007 Be Bold Be Red Be Brave: Ending Violence Against Women of Color, and Obama re-election efforts).
The final project for the class will consist of students working as a team to create an online campaign for a critical issue in their community.
For over the last 30 years, the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church Technical Assistance Network (MICTAN) has been committed to both serving persons newly infected with HIV/AIDS and to serving those faith leaders who are in need of the tools to address the issue of HIV/AIDS in their churches.
And, from their commitment of “WHOSOEVER”, John 3:16, MICTAN founded in 1993 the First Response Center.
Though MICTAN started providing services and training’s at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., the MICTAN First Response Center is still needed today as the African-American community grapples with the increase in HIV newly infected cases.
The Community Organizing Class,chose MICTAN First Response Center to continue to do the work that MICTAN does it will need a web presence.
Now, MICTAN cordially invites all to attend the re-launch of it’s First Response Center online presence on Monday, May 6, 2013 at 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm in the Susie McClure Library on the campus of American Baptist College.
For more information about the Re-Launch, follow MICTAN on Twitter and like their Facebook page.
