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.

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Birmingham bloggers get involved in Blog Action Day. We’ll keep a track of ongoings and post any relevant stuff as and when.