A group led by Caroline Holland, together with Josie Tetley, Verina Waights, Simon Holland, Jonathan Hughes, myself and Sheila Peace has obtained funding for an ESRC Seminar Series in 2011/12 under the title ‘Older People and Technological Inclusion: multidisciplinary perspectives on contemporary realities and aspirations’ The seminars will be as follows:
Seminar 1: Critical perspectives on technological inclusion – A critical review of ‘technological optimism’ in the context of the e-inclusion debate. This will bring together viewpoints of users, service providers, researchers and theoreticians in considering underlying assumptions about how older people relate to technological innovation.
Seminar 2: Understanding usability – ‘across the life course’ and ‘in the wild’ – A review of concepts of what usability is, and different perspectives on whether/when/how/why people engage with various technologies at different times in their lives. What happens in the real world? How do older people appropriate (parts of) technologies to suit their own priorities?
Seminar 3: Inclusion, usability, and difference – Understanding technological inclusion in the context of diverse lives: a discourse between different ‘classes’ of the excluded. What is distinctive about technological exclusion on grounds of age, disability, poverty, or lack of education – and what comparable? What lessons can be learned from experience? What fails? What works?
Seminar 4: How do we turn aspirations into realities? – Drawing together thoughts and commentary from the previous seminars, with contributions from older people, researchers, and other participants involved in supporting older people to take ownership of technologies relating to health, education and social life. Key issues for policy makers will be debated.
The International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) has decided to set up a task force on history, and I’ve been asked to join this. IFAC is an interesting body, established in 1956 at the height of the cold war to provide an international forum for the new discipline. You can find a bit about its origin in a recent paper of mine.
Earlier this summer I visited the archives of Berlin Technical University to look at the papers of Hermann Schmidt, an early contributor to cybernetics. I had already written about him in a Kybernetes article and there’s a more detailed paper due out in early 2011 in Information, Communication and Society. The archives hold a considerable amount of material, which may warrant further investigation.
I was privileged to attend the 7th International Conference on Holocaust Education and Remembrance at Yad Vashem, the International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem, from June 12 – 13 2010. More than 200 people representing 40 nations participated, and the panel sessions and presentations were videotaped and have been uploaded on to the Yad Vashem website at:
The conference was very high profile, and was opened by Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli Minister of Education, and the conference was addressed by speakers including Professor Yehuda Bauer, who gave an inspiring address, which included thought provoking discussions of issues in approaching teaching on the Holocaust, the role of the Allies, and anti-Semitism and the Second World War. Other speakers included an MEP, Dr. Leonidas Donskis, a former President of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and a former President of Croatia, Stjepan Mesic.
However, for me the most inspiring session was the panel session of 3 Holocaust survivors, one a Jewish resistance partisan, Dr. Yitzchak Arad, and two camp survivors, Roman Frister and Dr. Samuel Pisar. The panel discussed the questions of how we can continue to keep the lessons and stories of the Holocaust alive after the remaining survivors are no longer with us and the subject of Jewish solidarity during the Holocaust, on which the three survivors each had quite different experiences and perspectives.
Since the conference I have read Roman Frister’s tremendous and very honest autobiographical reflections in ‘The Cap or the Price of a Life’, and have also written a short article which I submitted to TES on 14 August. This article is about my experience of seeing the panel discussion and the power of this learning, and the value to student’s learning in schools of visits by Holocaust survivors for sharing first hand testimonies, and concludes with web links for organizations which can help provide survivor speakers for e.g., supporting school activities in the week of Holocaust Memorial Day in January.
Hazel Heath