Older People and the Digital Divide

Older People and The Digital Divide revolves around training as a tool to attract older people by providing a basic introduction of how to use both web and other Internet based tools to assist in maintaining day to day tasks.    For example, completion of application forms,such as income support, managing utilities, accessing banking and other home support services.    However, rather than use this training approach to solely address basic skills, we also want to address social isolation, which we have identified from previous work with social agencies  and from government policies about digital inclusion. We want, therefore, to integrate learning and skills-building into one package where the outcomes are two fold:    One is to address the fear of the web and internet which are experienced by older people and secondly, increase involvement by offering access to basic digital skills via our journalism-based module - the latter is designed to encourage the participant to actively seek out community and voluntary news that may be of support towards maintaining independence in the community.