The Community-Based Information Infrastructure of Older Adult Digital Learning

Abstract

In the United States of America, senior centers and public libraries are ubiquitous social institutions found in virtually every municipality. This article analyses these institutions as community-based information infrastructure in the digital learning practices of older adults. Older adults turn to these institutions to learn technology in retirement. How learning takes place in these spaces is shaped both by the institutions, and by the older adults. Negotiations between institutions and older adults shape digital learning. These negotiations are shaped by societal ageism. This article shows that older adults are not passive participants in technology learning, using services provided for them by others, but instead actively shape both how learning services are proffered and the institutional contexts in which these services exist. By learning to embrace the agency of older adults, these under-funded public institutions could powerfully reconfigure themselves for an information society that is also ageing.

The literacies‐as‐events in the day of a life of an octogenarian: literacies of thriving as habits of a lifetime and (im)materially constituted

“…While DITL does draw aspects of its lineage from developmental psychology (e.g., Gillen et al, 2006), more recently (Gillen, 2016), and in our study, it is oriented by sociomaterialism, including Law's (2016) argument that 'theory making should not take place outside careful reflection on case studies, in which the knowledge making practices of the researchers are implicated' (Gillen, 2016, p. 2). Our study, like Gillen's (2016), engaged with the DITL methodology for its ability to allow us to study literacies and 'moments of being in situ' (p. 2), in a form of what we call an inquiry of radical specificity, or the ability to generate knowledge and theory by paying vigilant attention to the details, trajectories and make-up of literacies in action and the moment-to-moment doing of these literacies and the events that produced them and in which they were produced.…”

Perspectivas de acessibilidade na autoria de cursos e recursos educacionais abertos: um panorama internacional

“…Diversas iniciativas podem ser encontradas na literatura sobre o uso da tecnologia para promover a inclusão, seja para pessoas com deficiência (Terrazas-Arellanes et al, 2018;Aunio e Education, 2016;Souza e Rocha, 2019;Galasso et al, 2018), imigrantes (Colucci et al, 2017;Castano-Muñoz, 2018), idosos e outros grupos que enfrentam barreiras ou alguma situação de vulnerabilidade no acesso às tecnologias digitais (Lenstra, 2017;Wong et al, 2017). No entanto, parece haver uma lacuna na disponibilidade de plataformas e ecossistemas que promovam a inclusão em contextos de ensino e de aprendizagem.…”

A Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion: An Architectural Overview

“…Several initiatives have been found in the literature on the use of technology to promote inclusion, whether for people with disabilities [ 27 – 30 ], immigrants [ 31 , 32 ], elderly people and other groups that face barriers or some situation of vulnerability regarding access to digital technologies [ 33 , 34 ].…”