Hi Taran,
Looking forward to your mother's input to DDN, but thank you already for the marvelous description of the telecenter for seniors in Graham Park.
And thanks for:
In a way, I started getting interested in the Internet after Guido, my husband, had a stroke that left him half paralysed, and labeled as a "deep aphasic" in 96. Actually, he went on writing over 200 book reviews for the Italian weekly Panorama as a "deep aphasic", reading books in English, French, and reviewing them in Italian - but the label stuck in his medical record. He didn't have access to the internet in the clinic, and wielding literary journals with one hand was impractical. So I did the research for him from school, and printed the articles in A4, which he could manage. Had he had direct access to the internet back then, maybe he would not have chosen to refuse dialysis in 2000. He would have kept in touch with people, instead of through me.I suppose when I see someone in a wheelchair, I do not look away - I see a mind on wheels. And I'll be talking with a few of these people and, more importantly, listening. They have a lot to tell us. If there are any resources for this sort of telecenter that people are aware of, please let me know. It would be nice to have more of these minds telling us what they need and what they want.
Since then, a few old people's homes have been wired here too too, by Claudio Giugliemma, who is an assistive technology developer (see www.qualilife.com ). He makes interface programs, on one basic principle: one click only, and a click that can be made by raising an eyebrow if you have Locked in Syndrom: the video cam transmits that to the computer. Claudio also customized a program for the safety of an epileptic person whose crisis could potentially be mortal: there's a permanent video camera monitoring in the room, but it only sends a signal and starts broadcasting to the nurses and doctors if it perceives movements that may announce a crisis - to preserve this person's privacy.
At federal level, we have infosociety (www.infosociety.ch ) a think-tank about the digital divide: Switzerland is highly wired, but 40% of the population has never been online. Infosociety depends from our Federal Communication Office OFCOM (www.bakom.ch ), and their idea of fighting the digital divide is lugging a juggernaut with 12 i-Macs inside through the country, with 24 hour stops in each chosen town, at 80 liters of fuel per 100 km. That's called "Tour-de-clic" (www.tour-de-clic.ch ). When they planned to come to Ticino, ADISI suggested they stop at the Socio-Psychiatric Clinic in Mendrisio were Guido had died in 2001. Answer: no, we don't have the needed specialised skill to deal with mentally challenged people.
Still, Giovanni Rengucci and I went there as volunteers when the lorry stopped in Lugano, Bellinzona and Locarno. Most fun memory in Bellinzona: there was an old man drinking coffee and waiting while his sixtyish daughter was getting instructed. "Won't you have a go too?", I asked him. "I'm too old for these things", he said. "It's not much more difficult than typing, you know" "Oh, that I can do, I had a television and radio shop before I retired - even used a computer for the accounts in the last years". In five minutes, he was surfing happily, and telling me of the "poste à galènes" he had made as a teen-ager - and being the first person in Ticino to get fined by the Post Office for using it without a license (the fine notice, framed, still hangs in his dining room). Of having, hum, borrowed, RAI soccer comments from a mountain top near the border, and re-broadcast them for the other radio-amateurs on the Swiss side. I showed him 2600.com "Shall I soon read about your feats here?", I joked. "Mmmm, tempting", he said, with a glint in his eye.
OK, not all over-80's have been radio pirates as kids. Some have never used a keyboard. But if you introduce tech on the basis of what they can and want to do, it should work. In theory, we were meant to take people to a set list of sites at Tour-de-Clic: railway time tables, cantonal administration, that stuff. I showed them how to look them up, bookmark them, copy the URLs in an e-mail they sent to a wired relative, and then we went on to what they wanted.
***
Younger generation: we got a query from a student in "communication science" at USI (www.unisi.ch) about ADISI's page listing search engines, which she had found researching for her degree dissertation: she wanted to know our "scientific criteria of selection". Embarassing. I chose to be candid: "This is an old 2002 page, not linked to anymore from the menus and ear-marked for deletion; anyway, the selection was haphazard: please disregard it". I directed her to sites were she could find statistics about internet use, adding that Wikipedia is a good starting point for many searches, and to have a go with Google scholar - but that most info presented in Italian on the ADISI site came from listservs like DDN and WWWEDU and Net-Gold. She thanked me, adding that her dissertation topic is "The role of institutions in the communication of science". I suggested she should also include a part on *non institutional* communication of science, by contrast: arxiv.org , but mainly wikis, refering in particular to your "Wikis as trees" post, Taran.
-- Claude Almansi www.adisi.ch
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