(Silver) surfing with mother
“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”, as Lewis Carroll would say - it is Silver Surfers Day today #SSD09 if you want to follow it on Twitter.
Managed by Digital Unite (@digitalunite on Twitter), Silver Surfers Day started back in 2001 with 40 events and this year it is the key event in the national campaign to get ‘older people’ online and there will be over 1000 events nationwide. Silver Surfers Day always falls in the Friday of Adult Learners’ week.
So - to that end I am going to take my mother to one of the Cambridge events http://silversurfers.digitalunite.com/2009/05/05/cambridge-online-2/ Mummy is 82 with a son in Hong Kong along with her 4 small grandchildren who she misses terribly, Dad died not long ago so now seems a perfect time to really encourage her to dive head first in to a new challenge which will make it so much easier for her to keep in regular contact with the Hong Kong contingent, and explore mycology, Eastenders and local classes online and so on.
I digress!! With everyone from the Prime Minister to Stephen Fry extolling the benefits of online, and with increasing numbers of local services being put online it is crucial that the older members of society arn’t further excluded or isolated but are able to lean from and realise the very real benefits they can gain from being online.
Leonie Vlachos Manager of Digital Inclusion at Age Concern / Help the Aged welcomes events such as Siver Surfers Day, and highlights the importance of support from local authorities, “Approximately, 9.2million older people are still not accessing the benefits of being online and we all have a role to ensuring that older people are not left behind. That is why Age Concern and Help the Aged provide IT taster sessions for older first-times users and fully support Silver Surfers Day. We believe that Local Authorities have a key role in supporting the digital inclusion of older people through the provision of training and access at local community centres and libraries. This is absolutely essential if older people are to continue accessing vital Local Authority services and information that are increasingly moving online. We cannot have a push to migrate services online without an equal push to get older people online”.
Across the 2000 members of the DC10plus network, there is huge activity around digital engagment for Silver Surfers, notably in Birmingham where Nicola Bryant the marketing manager of Digital Birmingham was telling me, “As part of Silver Surfers Day we are launching the second phase of our ‘Keeping IT in the Family’ series at Acocks Green Library.
The ‘Keeping IT in the Family’ initiative is a comic style resource designed to help young people, particularly school-aged children teach their family members important IT skills. Originally developed as a pilot with Microsoft, the success of the pilot attracted subsequent funding from BECTA, which has enabled the development of a second series which builds upon the basic IT skills gained in the first series and moves the family on to use those new skills to get the most from digital technologies. The ‘Keeping IT in the Family’ links to the Government’s Universal Home Access (UHA) agenda for which Birmingham is a UK pilot. UHA was established to increase ICT skills in families and communities which may have a poor understanding and take-up of computers and the internet.
We are arranging for 10 children from Prince Albert School and St. John Wall, Handsworth to attend a Silver Surfer ‘Wired up for Well Being’ Session at Acocks Green Library in Birmingham that is being run as part of Silver Surfers Day. This session will be focusing on money matters, shopping online, booking holidays, use of comparison websites, lastminute.com. The children will be using their skills and knowledge from the Keeping IT in the Family initiative to teach the grown-ups how to use the computer and search online.”
http://silversurfers.digitalunite.com/
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May 15, 2009, 12:36
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Some additional exciting news from Digital Unite on Silver Surfers Day, “We are also starting a new project from this SSD which is called Schools for Silver Surfers. This links the schools network with sheltered housing, via Specialist Schools Academies Trust and EroSH (the sheltered housing charity). We see this link-up - which is a win-win for both
types of organisation - as crucial. Please see more on Schools for
Silver Surfers here:
http://dnc.digitalunite.com/category/silver-surfers/schools/
Please - all - go to http://dnc.digitalunite.com and add comments, tell us what you’re doing for SSD, what you wish you were doing, what you will do next week or when you’ve got time. There is no way we’re going to reach the 10million older people who currently don’t go online, unless we all actually help them - and that means doing something for older people you know and can reach. and then tell us about it, to inspire everyone else!” Thanks to Gill Adams from Digital Unite for these comments.