Thanks to all the marvelous Spring Online event holders up and down the land, we collectively ran just under 2,000 digital taster sessions for older people all over the UK last week. That’s another tremendous achievement for this eleven year old campaign, and especially at a time when many local and community groups are under pressure and cutting down on and sometimes sadly closing down activities. It was great fun seeing the Tweets flying about throughout the week, and getting updates from the event holder network.
I attended a great Spring Online event at the European Commission on Friday 27th. Run by Age UK London, the European Commission and with support from DWP volunteers - and despite there being a small gale raging and torrential rain - this event was very well attended and a lot of fun. Helpers had brought along ipads, iphones, Kindles and when the tables got too full to demonstrate, we whipped out our smart phones and other gadgetry and improvised. Having been at the first then Silver Surfers’ Day events in 2002, what was really interesting for me to witness first hand was the tremendous evolution in those 11 years, not just of the technology, but also in the mindset and outlook of people attending. In 2002 people came to find out what www was. In 2012 they came with their own smart phones, with MP3 players and with lists of questions about using I Player and digital radio and getting the best out of data restricted broadband contracts. No one I spoke to was not online, but everyone wanted to get more from life online. It was tremendous to see how relevant and how useful Spring Online remains in this ‘upgraded’ context.
We were all delighted that Sec of State Iain Duncan Smith visited the event as well. It’s his second year at a Spring Online event, and his genuine interest in, and enthusiasm for, older people’s adoption of digital technologies is evident. And thank goodness he is personally engaged in this topic; with growing numbers of older people in the UK the government’s capacity to inform them, transact with them and support them online is going to be critical to serving them