Blending on-line & off-line interactions:
For many individuals, day-to-day life is lived through a blend of online and offline interaction. Conversations started face-to face with friends move to SMS on the way home, onto social network site chat later on and perhaps at some point to a Skype call. Snapshots of a social event taken on a smartphone might be uploaded to the web, shared, liked, discussed and then shown around on a screen at the next face-to-face meeting, extending engagement as content and conversation seamlessly shifts between online and offline. Yet the majority of services and support for disabled and older individuals are delivered either offline or online, with strong dividing lines between the two. Blending offline and online support can happen in many ways. It might be driven by a facilitator taking a ‘blended facilitation’ approach to amplify face-to-face work with young people by sharing it online. Or it might involve using the web to connect people to meet to share ideas and experience offline. Many areas of the country now have hyperlocal online websites – such as the London ward based Haringey Online.
Use digital tools to enable peer to-peer learning
In the Internet age, education doesn’t have to be top-down or only available in formal settings. Digital tools can support peer-to-peer learning, where young people and adults are both teachers and learners – sharing their experiences and knowledge with each other. It can be easier to learn from someone with similar experiences to you and who is able to communicate information in more accessible ways. Digital peer-to-peer learning might take place online, through social networks and social media; or digital tools might be used to bring Joe Roberson is the co-ordinator of a recent Innovation Labs project (www.innovationlabs.org.uk) which aims to create digital tools that support young people’s mental health. He describes how co-design approaches: “... get service users and professionals to think about how someone other than them will experience a service or application, both before and after it’s been developed. Using these tools results in a better understanding of what is important for service users when they interact with the product or service. This in turn leads to more well-rounded ideas. The Internet has the potential to revolutionise learning. Webcast lectures or inspirational clips from TED Talks (www.ted.com/talks) demonstrate the power of the web in supporting self-directed learning and providing access to high quality education resources. Peer-to-peer learning complements these one-to-many forms of online education with opportunities for many-to-many learning, where ‘everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn’ (a motto often quoted by SchoolOfEverything.com). Confidence is important for effective peer-to-peer learning: both the confidence of ‘teachers’ and the confidence of learners.
Similarly, it is important to explore who are young people’s peers. Traditional age groupings found in classrooms can make way for digital peer groups organised around skills, needs, interests or challenges.
This approach is ideal scenario for older, disabled people but only if additional tools for supporting this seamlessness between offline and online is available to a wider audience.
However, our accessible digital hub is not just about providing a safe and secure space for people to get on-line, it is also a tool for creating community connections that can be harvested in such a way as to create real opportunities for members to form relationships both on-line and off-line; to aide in this we have introduced a fun-based learning module based on simple stages of journalism where members can share community activities, stories, articles and features. This becomes an integral part in the enabling process where skills learnt empower and create a community stake that helps others get online.
In essence we at Park View Project indulge in ensuring our sessions integrate social support with digital learning, which is the only way to learn dynamically.