TVLATA is an educational and creative experience in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for Development field, created in 2007 for young people who belong to a brazilian civil society organization called Bagunçaço. The project is located in Alagados, a suburb of Salvador de Bahía city, in the Northeast of the country. This experimental television project has been developed by Neokinok.Tv, an audiovisual-experimental and artistic collective settled in Barcelona, Spain.
The idea of the project came up in 2006 while I was working for the Spanish Agency of Cooperation for Development (AECID), the institution that put the project in motion and gave to them the economic support.
From that moment on, the objective is to implement an experimental television platform whose digital contents – texts, images, music and videos- are all made by the students with the assistance and supervision of their teachers and trainers. In the TvLata Laboratory, students use new media technologies and Web 2.0 resources to create their own audiovisual television programs. As well, they have their own blogs to post information and a radio for showing their musical recordings. One of the most interesting achievements has been taught them how to make a streaming on line program, that allow them to make live programs too. We did not pay attention to their lack of knowledge or skills in order to motivate them all to enrol the project. They designed the logo, they have intensively participated in the process of designing the web and they choose the contents of the television.
Since the beginning of the project, the main intention was to offer them (involved in an entertaining and easy environment) a digital culture formation in order to contribute to their knowledge about the power of the civil society in the new media, the main differences between traditional and new media or subjects like “what it means to have a voice in the world wide web for expressing themselves”.
