Promising practices in collaborative digital literacy and digital media-making with older adults

Abstract

For the past seven years, the Ageing, Communication, Technologies (ACT) team (http://actproject.ca/) has been creating workshops and events that engage older adults, many who have limited access to digital tools and technologies, in digital media-making projects. We collaborate with elders in a variety of Montreal settings, from public libraries, to public housing and organizations founded and run by seniors developing ways to both meet their individual wish to engage with digital media, as well as their collective desire to “take a class” that is social and sociable. Building on our past work on “precarious ageing and media-making”, as well as the impetus to “mediatize” older adults and organizations, we focus on both the concept of promising practices and the specific insights of those who lead these workshops: the students and professionals employed by ACT, all of whom are young adults, between the ages of 18 and 35. We begin by offering a set of five “promising practices” for collaborative digital media making with seniors. From our point of view, promising practices are not prescriptive, but rather a way of contesting some of the imperatives and normativities subsumed by the idea of “best practices”. We conclude the paper by describing the key principles to our contextualization of “best practices” in terms of digital workshops for seniors.