INDIE was invited to attend a Digital Champion stakeholder meeting with Ireland’s National Digital Champion David Puttnam in the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources on 13th March 2014. The meeting comprised of
1. Overview & Update
Dr. Albert Jordan, head of the Irish Government’s eInclusion Unit, gave an updated on Benefit 4 with nearly 92,000 trained to date. The Dept. is continuing to run its Switch-On workshops and trade online voucher scheme. Resources in the Dept. are still limited with 4 staff in the eInclusion unit. There was two pieces of research launched recently; The ESRI is carrying out a study of how broadband provision affects secondary school teaching and learning www.esri.ie/research/research_areas/competition_and_regulation/broadband-provision-and-s/ and Net Children Go Mobile www.netchildrengomobile.eu
2. Proposed Initiatives begin explored
Awareness raising
Mary Nally for the Third Age foundation outlined a project where the journey of an older person going online will be recorded with the assistance of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh. It was suggested that a grant for the making of this could be sough from the BAI under the Sound Vision initiative which covers programmes to improve adult literacy. http://www.bai.ie/?page_id=92. NALA have extensive experience of this process having made a large number of series on literacy. The Dept. will also be in touch with RTE to see if there are other opportunities to promote awareness of digital inclusion.
Digital Champion Awards
The Dept hopes to hold awards at the end of this year. There was a discussion around the categories for the awards and how the term inclusion should be part of any awards category. Other suggested categories were Social Enterprise and non-formal education.
Benefit Showcase
The Dept. is planning an event in May to highlight the 100,000 people trained under Benefit and they will launch the awards at this event. There was discussion about Tech Week www.techweek.ie/index which is organised by ICS and the also the meeting organised by FIT with all their training centres.
Schools
Age Action and Google explained about their Silver Surfer Towns initiative and how students in schools provided one to one training for older people in local areas. There are over 500 Secondary Schools in Ireland and since Log on Learn has come to an end there is an opportunity here to engage with schools. Age Action is hoping to secure a sponsor for this initiative from 2015 as their 4 year partnership with Google will come to an end.
Mary Nally outlined a project called “The Way We Were” involving TY students filming older people. David Puttnam explained about Memory Rooms used for people with dementia with rooms laid out from previous times. This could be used like a set for this project. There are also a number of film festivals the film could entre such as FIS http://fis.ie/ and the CAST Film Festival http://castfilmfestival.com/
David Puttnam also said that RTE are making archived material publically available which also could be used by filmmakers.
3. Further Initiatives under construction
There was a discussion about issues of scale and sustainability. The discussion was around looking at new places where people gather to engage with technology such as coffee shops, pubs, supermarkets, GAA clubs. The IWA (Irish Wheelchair Association) has 50 centre nationally. There are venues in towns it just need a local digital champion to promote the benefits of being online. Peer to Peer learning is also very powerful when it comes to learning and NCBI uses an online forum for learners and they are currently involved in a project called DICE http://www.cfit.ie/dice
Digital Champions in Schools
There also was a discussion about identifying individuals in school who are digital champions and giving them a badge which they can wear. There is also an initiative called Digital Schools of Distinction for primary schools http://www.digitalschools.ie/
