English
This senior’s event featured speakers on solo travelling, heart health, living with a brain injury, rights and entitlements, cancer connect and lifelong learning. It was attended by just under 200 seniors from the rural area of North Cork, some of whom are participants on the AliVe project.
As the AliVe project takes a participatory approach so too did our talk and we asked the attendees to answer the question ‘What are the benefits to you of taking part in Lifelong Learning as you get older?’. You can see from the word cloud generated from their answers (shown below) that ‘social interaction’ was the most important benefit that older adults saw to them engaging in lifelong learning. This is important to remember when designing micro-credentials for older adults so they can meet their needs for this benefit. We also discussed the use of QR codes as part of our talk and provided a short mini workshop on using QR codes so we could facilitate the attendees to develop a new digital skill. Demand was high in the room for learning this skill and very few of the attendees had previous experience of how to use QR codes to access information via their phones. The attendees were aware of how important digital skills like this were for keeping connected and informed as older adults living in rural Ireland.
We were welcomed in the marquee with scones and songs and were very grateful to be invited to participate in such an inclusive and active community conference for older adults.
You can find more information on https://www.irdduhallow.com .
This is the word cloud generated at the event in response to the question ‘What are the benefits to you of taking part in Lifelong Learning as you get older?’ There were 51 responses.