8 out of 10 older people in the UK still can’t access online services – they aren’t media literate. SSD09 gives us all the chance to change that.

Media literacy, in today’s digital age, is more important than ever. It can facilitate a more convenient, cheaper, community-rich lifestyle. Older people, who have so much to gain from the online world, are still largely missing out. SSDO9 will reach many thousands of older people in hundreds of locations around the UK and do something very tangible about redressing that imbalance.

Digital Unite (DU) is managing the seventh annual Silver Surfers’ Day Campaign. Devised in 2002 by DU, SSD is the biggest annual media literacy campaign aimed at older people. (http://digitalunite.com )

(taken from digitalunite.com)

UPDATE – Share The Love has evolved! It’s time for The Twitterlizer!

To coincide with our stint at this year’s National Digital Inclusion conference in London, we’ve started a little fun campaign. ‘Share the Love‘ is about letting everyone know why you love the stuff that you love doing on the internet…simple! and then you can show someone who doesn’t know how to do it.. how to do it! simple again! It could be uploading a picture to Flickr with your mom.. it could be searching online for a new fence with your neighbour.. it’s up to you.. And if you can record what you did, by video, blog, twitter etc, you can share that love with everyone else too.. how pleasant!

We’ll be keeping a track of how much love is getting shared over on the ‘Share the Love‘ pages. If you want your video included on there just give us a shout.

For you Facebook fans out there, we’ve started a ‘Share the Love’ group too!

More details on what we have planned at the conference, coming soon!

You’ve probably heard of RSS or Atom: they are technologies for delivering web content to you. A feed reader is a bit of software (either online or on your computer) that lets you see and organise that content.

I’m not going to try and explain any more about what RSS and Atom are, because it will quickly become confusing (if it isn’t already). What I am going to do is try and explain what a feed reader does, through the following fishy story…

—
Once upon a time there was a vast lake, dense with fish. There were millions of them – of many different species, shapes, colours and sizes – and thousands of new fish appeared every minute.

Each day huge numbers of people would dive into the lake to look at the fish. But many only wanted to see certain kinds: people interested in blue fish only wanted to see blue fish; people interested in red fish with a fin missing only wanted to see those; and so on.

Unfortunately there were just too many fish. People were missing the fish they wanted to see, and the fish themselves were not getting the attention they deserved.

Then one day a group of clever folk invented a special kind of diving goggles. These goggles could be set to display only those fish which met certain criteria. So people who only wanted to see blue fish could now do so with little trouble.

And because the goggles knew which fish the user liked, they could let them know of other fish that they might find interesting.

On top of that, the user could fine-tune the goggles to display exactly the fish they wanted to see (for example they could choose not to see Bob Bigfin, who was an annoying blue fish). They could also set the goggles to automatically tell their friends know which fish they liked.

Of course, lots of people thought this was a great idea and started manufacturing their own goggles. Some gave theirs away free of charge, and some sold theirs with extra features.

And so everyone was able to find what they were looking for in the vast lake, and discover new fish based on what they already liked.
—-

And so it is with your feed reader: you can filter the web for what interests you. The difference is that don’t have to swim around the lake: you see the results all in one place, without having to go back to a website or search engine.

All you need to do is give the feed reader the address for the feed, be it RSS or Atom (you may be given a number of options for different versions of both: don’t worry too much about which to choose, it won’t make much difference). The feed reader then does the rest for you:  it looks online and displays anything new almost as soon as it’s published.

[Originally blogged on citizensheep.com. Thanks to Julia Gilbert for suggesting additional material.]

Over the past month or so I’ve been talking a lot with colleagues from We Share Stuff, from BCU, and with bloggers I know in Birmingham and beyond about digital mentoring.  The idea of digital mentoring assumes that we are all better off if we can all make good use of all the digital goodness around us.  This has it root in a number of commonly held beliefs: we’re more employable if we have better digital literacy, we’re more socially mobile if we can move through the digital world with ease, and we’re better able to be active members of a democratic process that is increasingly mediated online.

Off the back of this, I came up with a list of three things I wish my students could do from Day 1 when they arrive at Birmingham School of Media: these are not core IT skills that most students already have (email and word processing), but basic social media ideas that make them active and included digitally.

Three steps to digital inclusion

1. Make use of RSS:  the only realistic way to track the things that matter is to you is to use RSS: quite simply it brings the things that matter to you directly to your computer screen, so you don’t need to search them out. There’s no need for me to explain RSS in any great depth, when my BCU colleague Andre Dubber has already done it so well on his New Music Strateies blog.
2. Be able to blog: blogging won’t be relevant to all of the people all of the time, and it may be an activity that comes in fits and starts until an author finds their voice.  But understanding that you have the ability and the right to self-publish what matters to you using free services is a vital step to being digitally included.  We Share Stuff prefers Wordpress.com for simple and freely available blogging, and we can even help organisations by taking them through the early stages of setting a blog up.
3. Begin building a network: this third step is more strongly aligned to a model of digital inclusion for my students, though I think it has relevance to all.  A presence, even a basic one, on Linked In is the best way to put yourself in the telephone directory of the digitally included, and underpin the conversations and relationships built through reading and writing online.  I think of Linked In as three services: my CV online, and an address book that will follow me around where ever I go and always stay up to date, and a way of keeping my connections up to date with the progress of my work.  For other people, Facebok, MySpace, Twitter, or a combination of all these and more might be more appropriate.

Before these three items can come into play there is an initial benchmark for computer literacy: understanding file structures, mouse control, the metaphors of modern operating systems (point, click, file, folder), and the ability to send an email.  My list of three doesn’t necessarily assume this benchmark has already been achieved: demonstrating these three aspects of digital inclusion provides a context and a set of real learning outcomes that can be used as the basis of a new way of teaching computing to those who have never even turned on a PC or Mac.

Okay, so we’ve started to find some useful / poor / interesting / pointless websites and information contained therein. So what’s the best way to keep track, manage and share them with others? well that would be social bookmarking. Using this tool (and there are a few variations out there, see the list at the bottom of this page) it is possible to manage everything you find on the Internet and usually it’s as easy as clicking a button and adding a few words. Because a whole load of other people are doing the same, then the system becomes even more useful by rating the best and worse that’s out there. There are so many benefits to using social bookmarking that it’s best to just get in there and try it out.

Let’s have a look at Delicious. All you need to start is a valid email address, you may already have one, you may have one or two. Ever thought of having one simply to sign up to all these services? as a kind of gateway? Anyway, back to Delicious. Again, we don’t want to tell you how to use it here, they do it much better than we could on their help page, so head over there to get started.
You can find all our bookmarks on there so add us into your network and we’ll do the same. similar to how we did on twitter. It’s up to you whether any of our bookmarks are of any use to you, but in any case, please let us know how you get on. Remember, it’s all about the conversation.

A few Social Bookmarking sites

Delicious

Stumble Upon

Furl

Using a search engine is the most obvious way to try and find stuff online. Trouble is, there is so much of it out there. The trick is to put a bit of thought into your searching. By learning how to search for things you will find your information a lot quicker and easier. Then it’s a case of organising what you have found, finding and learning about the best tools to do this and of course, sharing what you’ve found with others (which we will cover in other parts of the ‘We Share…” series). This is the social web in action.

There are many ‘How To’ tutorials on searching the Internet and more specifically, Google. We have provided a few of them at the bottom of this page. Probably the best one is Google’s own. Have a go, see what you think. Then try the others and see how they compare. By all means, leave us a comment with your opinions or if you have any questions. If haven’t already joined Twitter, come and discuss it there. As long as you’re having a go and talking about it, that’s what counts.

Just a quick note that Google has now become much more than a search engine, but for our little experiments, the searching will do for now.

Using google web search

GoogleTutor

Google Guide

Here is ‘The social web’ as defined on Wikipedia.

The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web. Such people are brought together through a variety of shared interests. There are different ways in which people want to socialize on the Web today. The first kind of socializing is typified by “people focus” websites such as Bebo, Facebook, and Myspace. Such sites promote the person as focus of social interaction. To do this a profile is constructed by each user. In many ways the profile is similar to a passport.

The second kind of socializing is typified by a sort of “hobby focus” websites. For example, if one is interested in photography and wants to share this with like-minded people, then there are photography websites such as Flickr, Kodak Gallery and Photobucket.

There are also two ways in which people socialize with each other in the Social Web. The most general and most common type is always at a distance and only on the World Wide Web. In such socializing there is never face to face personal contact. Much of the socializing on Flickr is sharing of photos and making comments on the photos of others. However, where Flickr members come from a common local geographical area, then they are inclined to get together physically for a common photoshoot. This exemplifies the second type of socializing through the World Wide Web: that which leads to real physical contact. Typical examples of the latter arose historically from social networking both within and outside schools and colleges. Facebook’s origins are in the facebook of college students from Harvard University.

The Social Web may also be used to refer to two different, yet related concepts. The first is as a description of web 2.0 technologies that are focused on social interaction and community before anything else. The second is a proposal for a future network similar to the World Wide Web.

In terms of digital inclusion and adult learning, this can be the thing that currently ties everything together. Get involved with the social web, find the relevant networks and start sharing resources, news, applications – anything you like really.

There is a lot of stuff out there and it can be tricky knowing where to start. We like to get people using this stuff straight away so as we’re here, maybe we can get things going using a simple online application called ‘Twitter‘. This application is best described by the blurb on their website…

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

You only need an email address and password to start using Twitter and it’s really easy. Once you have registered, go to our twitter page and click ‘Follow’. We then get a message telling us that you are following us, we’ll follow you too. From then, we can send each other messages or ‘tweets’ about anything at all. In this context, it could be about learning resources and how to find them, other social web stuff, answers and questions..etc. From ‘following’ us, you can also follow any other relevant Twitter user and so we start to build our network of people who know stuff! probably more importantly, we start the conversation. It’s best understood by example so go get yourself a twitter account and we’ll show you where things can go!

http://www.twitter.com/