eScouts

About the project

Intergenerational Learning Circle for Community Service eScouts is aimed to develop an innovative intergenerational learning exchange between elderly and youth volunteers, centred on the development of the digital competences of the eldest and on the guidance to the youngest to better face their upcoming adult life challenges.

This intergenerational experience will take place through a variety of local stakeholder organisations (LSO, e.g. public internet centres, youth and elderly associations, etc) with a view to produce a transversal impact over the communities they are serving.

In this way, eScouts expects to contribute to broader inclusion objectives and policies (both in digital and social terms), like the EU Ministers’ Riga Declaration on “ICT for an inclusive society” (2006), or the recent “Digital Agenda for Europe” (2010).

 The partnership aims to develop an innovative, intergenerational exchange between the elderly and young volunteers, using ICT as a vehicle for the promotion and exchange.

 

 The implementation of the project includes three main phases:

•  Train youth people (16-25) to become ICT teachers of the digital excluded elderly, with a “Community Service – Learning” approach.
• Train the elderly (retired people over 55) to become mentors for the youth (their previous teachers) to better face work and life challenges with an ethic dimension and valuing youngest “digital capital”.
• Train Facilitators of intergenerational learning of each country of the consortium to be the key actors and mediators of those two groups.

 The e-Facilitators have a crucial task, not only as teachers of ICT, but also as socio-cultural mediators. They promote disadvantaged users inclusion and e-Inclusion. Today their profile and their status varies considerably from country to country as well as access to formal or informal training. The project partnership “eScouts” will conduct a comparison study of these profiles and about the available educational opportunities in their respective countries. The goal will be to create a common professional profile in Europe. In the long term, “facilitators” will include trainers, tutors and other learning supporting profile working in the field of the third sector (involved in youth, volunteers, citizenship, …). High school could also be included, users of telecentres as well as senior entities  and retired residences.

 The Partnership aims to create a common and certifiable curriculum for different target group (young, elderly and the facilitators promoting e-Inclusion), to be exploited by the partner organizations and new stakeholders thanks to exploitation plan.

Youth will be prepared under the “Community Service – Learning” approach, having practical assessment and advising, while performing their task in reality.

Elderly, once learned how to manage ICT, will take benefit from it addressing their expertise and vision of reality to their young teachers, complementing this process in face to face meeting to empower the emotional links between them.

A final feedback from the youth will be promoted to close the exchanging circle.

Contextualization of the learning program designs will be a relevant aspect to assure the success of the initiative, but to make it scalable to further realities, guidelines and recommendations will be created in order to facilitate the process.

There is a growing belief that young people are not motivated to make an effort to study or to work and they are not seen as a social transformers or active citizens as it was before. There is also a lack of communication and interaction between generations due to the isolation we are experimenting as human beings since there is a decreasing participation in a social activities or groups, politics, family celebrations and civic actions. It makes more visible prejudices that young people and elderly have to each other since they don’t share daily routines.  

The eScouts project aims to prove that innovative ways of communication and activism through ICT are strongly re-shaping social interaction, learning approach as well as general perspective of life’s expectations and values. Elderly facing the digital gap and assessing the youth can still feel useful and updated within the society, and youth can learn perspectives in values and can be inspired to discover their job preferences since they become teachers and get to know ICT from another point of view. In addition, the interaction itself hopes to be a great benefit for both target group and from a community vision, an important social improvement.

 E-INCLUSION and E-ACCESSIBILITY in EUROPE

With the Riga Declaration (11 June 2006), “ICT for an inclusive society”, the European Ministers set themselves the goal of making all public websites accessible by 2008. The aim was to halve, by 2010, the difference in the percentage that exists between the general use of the Internet and its use by disadvantaged groups. This Declaration re-affirms some fundamental concepts regarding access to and use of new technologies. Indeed, ICT influences GDP growth and productivity, helping to improve the quality of life and social participation. It is, therefore, necessary and important to give  special attention to making it to accessible to all groups of people, in particular the disabled and elderly people, who, for various reasons, are unable to take advantage of such resources. Policies for e-Inclusion, reiterated in Riga, have as their primary purpose, the use of ICT, aimed at greater social inclusion.

The Declaration expresses specific recommendations regarding the various issues related to e-Accessibility:

-       Workers and the elderly: potential benefit of the internal market for ICT products and services, improve employment opportunities and working conditions of older workers, increasing productivity through the use of ICT solutions and training on new project technologies, encouraging their active participation in society, improving the quality of life, autonomy and security.

-       Promote the inclusion of different cultures: to strengthen pluralism, cultural identity and linguistic diversity in the digital space, to promote the digitization, the creation of electronic archives accessible and trans-national access to digital information and cultural heritage in support European integration.

The Riga Declaration concludes with an invitation to any other authority, civil society and industry to respond to the suggested recommendations by increased attention to the needs of the older population, reducing the spatial heterogeneity and adhering to the principles of e-Accessibility.