Stuart and I spent today in Coventry at Grapevine, a charity whose vision is “that people with learning disabilities are included in everyday life and enjoy lives enriched by having valued roles and being ‘connected’ to communities.” ‘Connected’ and ‘communities’ are words that fit well in the ethos of empowering people with social media skills, so we were happy to go along and see what we could do to help.

The guys and girls at Grapevine today were part of a media skills course, led by Denise Stokes, they are learning about how news works – what makes it and how it’s told. The course already has a blog — but at the moment it’s written by the tutors, by the end of the course the hope is that the trainees will have taken over.

We split the group into two, and tried to find out what each person wanted from the internet — the replies ranging from “the news” to “Elvis”.

There are already a couple of keen photographers in the training group, so Flickr seemed a good way to get everybody involved. First we looked for some pictures of The King, and Geraldine was really happy to find a group of photos of Elvis impersonators — nine Elvi obviously being better than one. We forget so easily how the simple skills of being able to find things on the ‘net that we enjoy can open up tons of opportunities — a ‘divide’ that can be so easily crossed if done in an engaging way.

The next stage was to get someone up and running and sharing, so Alan (already very into photography) took a photo and had his own Flickr account within minutes.

Alan didn’t have an email address, so as part of the sign-up he now has a Yahoo email account — the email account can act as a gateway to other social media sites in the future, we don’t have to think of that as a communication end in itself. We also tried delicious, both as a way of remembering favourite sites and to find new ones. Stuart’s group went as far as to create a blog – all in under the hour that we spent directly working with the trainees.

I was pleased that our concept of starting from an existing interest and building towards sharing worked well as a method of engagement, it doesn’t seem the most original of concepts but a lot of more formal approaches would struggle to work with a group of such differing abilities and interests. I think we would have liked more time, more computers – so everyone could try something at once – and maybe even a chance to try some video blogging. Video is a hugely accessible blogging method for people who may find typing or reading difficult, and something that we think will work well with this group.

A lot of agencies or bodies are obsessed with the ‘risk’ to children or vulnerable adults, but in truth the risk is a lot less than anyone would encounter in the real world. Also as Darren Cannan, our first contact with the Grapevine team who Stuart met at a Birmingham Social Media Café, says risk is something that everyone needs to learn how to deal with — the manageable risk of online interaction is even a good lesson in this regard.

It’s really heartening that Grapevine are attempting to open up access to social media. Access to the technology is pushed from many angles, but the fun (even forgetting the real value) of connecting online is something that really should be available to all.