50-plus Digital
The new website address is https://50pd.uk
Community Digital Drop-in Bloggers
Older people using digital inclusion to challenge isolation and loneliness in our community
Posts by volunteers, staff and session workers
The new website address is https://50pd.uk
Our last session was 2 March. The 9 March drop-in was suspended. Today we felt that it was unsafe even for a podcast session with only six people in the room — so that had to be cancelled too.
We cannot tell you when we will be open again.
The whole point and purpose of the drop-in project is real-world social inclusion — explicitly counteracting the social distancing of the virtual world. But now we have to counteract the really serious effects of social distancing implied by the COVID-19 crisis.
So we are going to fast-forward existing plans to offer an online drop-in and online learning to older people who are isolated at home. That might be all of us soon.
Many of you already have the basic resource — a GSuite account. More than 100 people have email accounts at seniors.org.uk, bold.org.uk, szs.net or agewell.org.uk. Those are all GSuite accounts, and they all provide immediate access to an online meeting room app named Meet. We could add about 450 more, and it’s all free for us.
If you have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or a desktop computer that is not too old — and an Internet connection at home, you should be able to use GSuite Meet. We expect that many of you will need help while you are using it, so we will recruit volunteers to join the sessions.
The online drop-ins will be group events, not conversations between 2 people — so you can expect to see familiar faces and hear familiar voices.
We still have many details to work out, and we still don’t know how we can include digital beginners and people with no Internet at home.
Everybody with one of the GSuite accounts has already received a link to the first experimental online drop-in. We are still testing it, so nothing much will happen for a few days. The information you need will be in your email and messages soon.
(Edited after posting to remove references to Whitmore Community Centre, which does not figure in our current plans).
After the 2 March session, we suspended the weekly drop-in because Internet access had stopped — but we were expecting to return quite soon.
But on the following day, we realised that Internet access had become irrelevant. We can’t restore the normal drop-in until the COVID-19 crisis is over.
That doesn’t mean we can’t do anything — but we would have to make substantial changes to ensure your safety. Here are some of the ideas and principles we are working on …
It could be a very long time before we can get back to how it was last week. But what do you think we could do next week, next month, or the remainder of the year? If you are a regular drop-in user, you probably know how to contact us quickly. The details are also on our Information page.
The Vodaphone contract has ended. Centre management are unable to renew it.
We are using a portable wireless router with an upmarket 4G data plan. This is working quite well in the Meeting Room — but it won’t work at all for the desktop computers in the IT Room. Good, but not good enough.
We have a solution that will restore improved Internet access to the centre. We have put this totally-workable plan to centre management — and we will tell everybody else when we have their response.
Same place, same time — different day.
The first of a new series of Agewell Mobile workshops
The workshop last week (Google Photos workshop part 1) was very successful — so successful that we didn’t have time to finish, and we didn’t even start on some of the most important points. We under-estimated the interest in this topic and the number of questions that would be asked. We will continue next week — and we have space for a few more people who are not complete beginners.
The first of a new series of Agewell Mobile workshops
Google Photos is Google’s considerable foothold in this particular world of digital confusion. It’s an app that works on all devices. It offers free and unlimited cloud storage for all your photos and videos. It automates the upload from your device to the cloud storage area. It helps you organise your photo collection, and it helps you share it with your friends – or keep it as a private library.
It’s surprisingly easy, so at the workshop we will all install the app, upload some photos (which we will provide), and admire our results and how Google has organised them.
There are certainly some issues that can’t be ignored. We can talk about those at the workshop.
We have plenty of choices – but few, if any, are as convenient as Google Photos. We can examine them at the workshop. For example …
This episode is part of a series of pilots for an updated Talking Food Radio.
Original Talking Food 2012 description – “Hackney food guru Lydia Bachelor leads a discussion about healthy eating, nutrition, shopping, markets, cooking, recipes – and any other food experience and knowledge that we would like to share”.
It was not a radio production. It was a live event, streaming what would have happened anyway – and considerably longer than this edited version.
Budget: zero.
Production values: everything must be done by older people (even if the result is below BBC standard), use only the most basic equipment (available to everyone), the background hubbub is just as important as the voices close to the microphone (the social context is vital).
Message: “If you are listening to this – STOP. Turn off your computer NOW. Please accept this invitation to join us in the real world – we have food for your body, mind and soul – and none of it is digital. Real World First!”
Identifiable voices: Ayo, Benediccta, Beverley, Bola, Chitra, Gabriella, Josh, Lydia, Myrtle, Paula, Pauline, Peter, Rick.
Recorded 10 May 2012 at ‘The Lawns’, Matthias Rd, Hackney. Remixed June 2019.
The Lawns was a lively (but acoustically-challenged) computer and social centre for older Hackney residents.
The League of Meals was a fun project that did not survive contact with reality.
We were closed — entirely for funding reasons — April and May 2019. We haven’t solved the underlying problem, but Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing Association have given us a massive boost.
We started again Friday 7 June, 2 to 5 pm as usual.