On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 7:53 PM, Foo HK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> Perhaps all members can enlighten the rest of us what measures are we taking
> to close the digital divide.
>
> Many people, like global warming tend to talk and talk only but no action. We
> call them NATO ...No Action Talk Only. In the end, the artic summer would be
> without ice anyway (latest news)...first time in history there may not be any
> Artic ice in Summer.
>
> Similarly when we are in digital divide, what concrete actions we know of to
> overcome such other than just talk?
>
> Perhaps each member can contribute to this?
>
LOL OK: on a "think globally act locally" line, when I had a nervous
breakdown last Autumn, I organized what may have been the tiniest
"telecentre" in the psychiatric hospital where I went: my Mac laptop,
with NeoOffice (for-Mac version of OpenOffice). Some patients asked me
how to write a CV or job applications, so I showed them and made
models. Then there was a young woman, cattle-raiser by trade and
bloody good amateur photographer, so we went to a café with a wireless
connection and she made herself a Picasa picture album. That kind of
things.
When I left the hospital, I donated an iMac Bondy (vintage 2000) I
don't really need anymore, to the patients of the section where I had
been, setting it up with an admin and a user account, showing one of
them - typographer by trade - how to ... administer the puter.
We made of shared-files folder with the CV and letter templates, plus
a series of recipes (in that section, we cooked our evening meals
though we ate lunch at the hospital mensa), And I made a VERY BASIC
tutorial on the use of the puter ("Top right on any window, there's a
blue circle with a magnifying glass. Click on it to open a search
application in order to find files you have mislead. At the bottom of
any window, you'll see a series of symbol: it's called "Dock" and the
symbols are for the most frequently used programs, plus possibly other
programs you're using" - end of tutorial).
Then we made a users log form, with a column to write down possible
glitches and one for number of pages printed.
I mean, folks end up in a psychiatric hospital for a number of reasons
- but one fairly frequent one here in Switzerland is job problems,
often caused in turn by lack of IT training. So if they are
hospitalized for a certain length of time, it's a good occasion to
catch up on this. One young woman had never touched a keyboard or a
mouse, but she wanted to get a computer when she came out, though she
had little money to spare for one. So we got permission to go to the
Centro Sociale Autogestito Il Molino
<http://isole.ecn.org/molino/sito/index.php> in Lugano, so that she
could try their refurbished computer with Ubuntu and OpenOffice,
Firefox ecc. Being virgin of either Windows or Mac influences, she
never batted an eyelid and started working there alone.
's all for recent activities in that field. But I promised I'd go back
to the patients' association, Club 74, for a workshop on how to
introduce beginners to computers, based on the KISS principle -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle> ;-)
Best
Claude Almansi
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