Digital disenfrachisement and the elderly

 There's an article today on the ABC's website about how older people, especially those in rural and regional Australia, are having increasing difficulty in accessing services as they move online.

Some of the reasons are predictable, lack of a decent internet connection, not owning a laptop, etc.

It's what in the 2000's we used to call digital disenfranchisement, and we used to worry about how students from poorer backgrounds would cope with an increasing move to online learning, and without having decent access to online resources.

Well, I suspect it's still a problem for some students, but at least we can now be reasonably confident that they have the basic skills to carry out a web search, access wikipedia, fill in an online form, or create and share a Google Docs document.

For older people, that's not the case.

They never learned to use a computer or acquire the bag of cultural skills that means that they can find their way round a windows manager, add a new wifi connection (one thing I've learned from being involved with the Athenaeum is that a lot of family history people, while they can download and annotate docments and do lots of clever things, connecting to wifi is something that they don't know how to do - someone set it up for them at home, so they never learned), deal with a different text editor, do markup, or indeed deal with a different note taking application.

They simply never learned. And remember these are overwhelmingly motivated intelligent individuals, but I do have to say that a lot of them are around my age, which I regret to admit is seventy.

Now I am different from a lot of people in my age group.

In the 1980s I did IT support for botanists and wildlife scientists at a field research station, and then later on more general IT support for a large research orientated university.

This was at a time when desktop computing was beginning to become common and a lot of researchers needed a little bit of help, be it choosing a laptop to take out into the field (literally in the case of botanists, archaeologists and geologists), setting up a device, installing software, or indeed just some basic text processing skills.

At the time there a lot of different applications and different computer systems, so I learned pretty rapidly to find my way round various bits of software.

Basically I'm a hack.

Most people in my age group are not.

A lot of what they have learned is by means of magic spells - want to pay a bill online? Well you click here, add the payee's account details here, click confirm, type in the amount here, set the payment date with this calendar widget, click confirm for a second time, review the details, and click OK.

And we don't make it easy for them. My bank has two different calendar widgets in their online banking system, and which one you get depends on whether it's a person to person transfer or a bill payment.

I'm going to guess that a lot of people don't understand that to the bank, a person to person transfer is different from a bill payment, so it's processed by different software system written and maintained by a different team who decided to use a different calendar widget. And why should they know this?

And I could go on. Want to report a hazard to my local council? Well, you fill in an online form that asks you a lot of questions, name, street address, phone number, email address, before asking you to select a hazard type from a pick list (tree down, flooded street drain, etc) and submit a trouble ticket.

It does at least have an 'Other' category with a 128 character free form text entry field - useful when the hazard is a dead fox lying in the middle of a residential street.

I could go on and on. Medicare, Vehicle registration, the Tax office, they're all online, and they all want information presented in a different way, and if you've only learned magic spells, you're lost.

Likewise showing people how to do things doesn't really help them, it's just another magic spell, it doesn't build the skills to navigate online systems.

What we really need is a set of common design guidelines, like the early Mac user interface design manuals, that mean that everything looks the same, the menus have the same names and the options are the same - this was really they key to the early success of Apple computers - everything just worked, and worked the same way. (I once helped a visiting Korean researcher install a printer on her Korean language Mac, not because of any Korean language skills on my part, but simply because the menu options were in the same order as in the English language version of the operating system).

Sure, information literacy training would help. But most training available for seniors is task oriented, that brings us back to the world of magic spells.

And remember, quite often it's our older citizens that need to access the pensions office, Medicare, book a doctor's appointment, or lodge an escript with a pharmacy, or even borrow ebooks from the library, something that needs quite a bit of skill, and I can't help feeling that better interface design would help.

And of course, if you can't do these things, and always have to get one of the grandkids to help you, you end up in a state of learned helplessness.

And it's happened to me.

Some time round about 1986 a girlfriend and I decided to take a train to the Spanish border from London.

At that time you could only book an overseas train ticket in person was directly from British Rail at an office in Victoria station.

(Some travel agents could book tickets as well, but it took them days to do it.)

Now, British Rail could book you a ticket on French Railways, but not on Spanish trains, that you had to do yourself at the station in Irun, if you wanted to go further into Spain or Portugal.

The other thing British Rail could not do was sell us a seat reservation, our tickets only allowed us to get on the train, but they airily assured us that SNCF could reserve a seat for us at the Gare d'Austerlitz up to an hour before departure, subject to availability of course.

Well that might well have been the case, but when we got to the Gare d'Austerlitz, after about four hours sleep on the overnight boat train from London, the booking office clerk told us 'C'est tout electronique, utilisez le minitel publique' and gestured at a row of terminals in the booking hall.

Well we tried. The terminals had AZERTY keyboards, and the system was only in French. After ten minutes swearing we gave up and decided to chance being able to get two unreserved seats together. We stood most of the way to Bordeaux...

Mary Beard: talking classics

 Recently, I finished Mary Beard's latest book, Talking Classics - the shock of the old.

I was disappointed.

Rather than a spirited anecdote laced defence of  'the classics' - the study of Greek and Roman culture - I found it read more as a defence of teaching classics.

Now the classics have a difficult history.

During the nineteenth century the study of the classics was the mark of an educated gentleman, and looking at Charles Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) school timetable, one can see why. Apart from a bit of religion and a smattering of mathematics, they studied little but Latin and Greek, several hours a day, every day except Sunday.

And it was just Latin and Greek. No Roman history or archaeology, nothing quite so vulgar as a discussion of politics, corruption or what happens when some individuals become wealthy enough to buy control of the state, the res publica, the commonwealth, as one of Cromwell's men might have understood it.

And somehow a knowledge of Latin and Greek became required for getting into university, even to study sciences or medicine, and this of course meant that only those who had studied it at school could gain access to university, which of course produced a privileged elite.

By the time I went to university in the seventies, the specious requirement for competence in Latin and Greek, had gone, even though its ghost still howled in the darkness.

So why should one study classics? Or Russian? or anything else difficult and complex?

Let's take Russian, which I did study. Studying Russian was not simply to help you say 'я подчиняюсь' (I surrender) correctly, as the grim cold war joke went. Nor was it to read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy in the original - it was to try and gain some understanding of the opaque enigma of the Soviet Union and try and guess exactly what was happening, and this mean learning to assimilate a lot of complex and often obscure material and drawing sensible conclusions.

So with the classics, so with Egyptology, so with half a hundred other things.

The skills to learn, analyse and understand. If the history of the last fifty years teaches us anything it's that the future is unknowable,

And that's why the study of difficult things is important. To build understanding, not to be 'job ready'...

To ancient Rome via the Gertrude street tram

 

Earlier this year, J had a minor bit of surgery in one of the big city hospitals in Melbourne.

 Last week it was time for her post-surgical review, and that meant another trip to the city.

 The timing of her review was such that we would need to stay two nights in Melbourne, and since the hotel had a three nights midweek for the price of two deal, we decided to take the deal and have ourselves a day in the city.

 Doing so gave J an opportunity to visit a decent art store and pick up new paints and brushes, and let us do a bit of face to face rather than online shopping.

 We also did some fun things like a trip to a proper Japanese sushi restaurant where in true Tokyo style you picked your plates off a conveyor belt and stacked the colour coded plates on your table, and paid on the basis of the number of plates (two blue, one green, one yellow, etc)

As a fun twist the restaurant also had a range of specials, which you ordered via a touchscreen on your table and were delivered by a little delivery robot that ran along a track on top of the sushi conveyor belt.

 Silly, but fun.

 It also gave me an opportunity to visit the Ancient Rome exhibition at the Melbourne museum.

 This was a touring exhibition from Italy of mainly early imperial period sculpture, artefacts and frescos, and included something I had only read about – a removable marble hairpiece for a sculpture.

 

The Romans used these on statues of Imperial ladies so that they always had a fashionable hairstyle.

 There were other interesting items, a cute little pottery pig from a child’s grave, mass produced Samian ware and some Roman glassware.

 The exhibition is structured around various aspects of Roman life, such as the baths, formal dinners, death, religion and so on.

 The focus is on early Imperial artefacts, probably because that is the most materially rich period, but they do attempt to show the rise of Christian belief as the dominant religious belief in Rome and how it provided a degree of continuity with the period after the formal end of the empire in 476CE.

 Getting to the exhibition was fairly simple – we took the 96 tram from the city to the corner of Gertrude Street and walked past the exhibition building – which was hosting a graduation ceremony for the University of Melbourne that day – and into the museum.

 Unlike some visiting exhibitions this one was not particularly busy, giving you plenty of time to look at the artefacts. Obviously, your mileage may vary on this – when we visited, it was a typical cold damp Melbourne winter day, and the tram system was warning of disruption to trams running past Parliament House, as it was the day of the anti One Nation/Pauline Hanson school strike.

 As  it was, we didn’t see anything of the demo, and by the time we rode the tram back to Parliament station to change to a Metro train back to our hotel, the manifestation was most definitely over, and the greatest risk was crowds of newly minted graduates and their proud parents making their way home.

Agatha Christie, and more Agatha Christie

 I seem to be going through a bit of an Agatha Christie period of my life.

Not only have I read two or three of her mystery novels as my bedtime reading - and I certainly did not expect the ending in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd, today I catalogued the Christie novels in the Athenaeum's historic book collection.

Apart from an early edition of the Seven Dials Mystery, most of them were post world war two crime club editions, and not particularly remarkable.

As I've written elsewhere, I'm fascinated by the fact that she simply took the train to Iraq in the nineteen thirties when when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, on his archaeological excavations in north eastern Syria, and in Come, tell me how you live she describes catching the Taurus Express - the Orient Express's eastern cousin at a remote railway station just across the border in Turkey, and how this train of blue Compagnie des Wagon Lits carriages appeared out of the desert, and train conductors wearing smart uniforms loaded her luggage and helped her onto the train before continuing its journey across the wilds of eastern Turkey.

But that wasn't the most adventurous journey. 

The bus from Damascus to Iraq in the 1930's must have been quite something - no roads, just a hard packed desert track across the emptiness.

I havn't been able to find an image of the track from the 1930's, but I did find one dating from 1970, when it was still a wild unpredictable track across the desert...

However, it wasn't all Agatha Christie today, a couple of golden age crime novels, 

including a copy of John Dickson Carr's Death watch, evidently just about read to death, given how scuffed the cover is, a few romances and an 1874 edition of Wiiliam Carleton's The Black Baronet

Twenty three years...

 

Way back in 2003, when we moved to Canberra from York in England, we needed a car - so after driving a rental Pulsar for two or three weeks we bought ourselves a second hand Subaru Impreza - three years old and a hundred thousand kilometres on the clock.

Arguably the number of kilometres it had done were a bit high for its age but it drove well and had a full service history.

For a time it was our only car, and I caught the bus or rode my bike to work most days.

When we moved further out in Canberra, we ended up with a car each and the old Impreza became my daily commute.

It lasted well without major problems, and by the time we moved to Victoria ten years ago, it had done 275,000 kilometres and still drove well. 

We did talk about selling it then, but decided to keep it as a backup, and I used to use it to transport all my cataloguing equipment between Chiltern and Beechworth when I was cataloguing the contents of Dow's pharmacy and Lakeview.

By the time I'd finished with the National Trust it had done over 300,000km and was beginning to show its age, even though it still rattled along at a decent speed.

Latterly, we found it was basically just sitting there, so today we sold it to a recycler.

We'd had hopes of selling it to someone who wanted to buy it to restore, but the fuel crisis and cost of living squeeze put paid to that, so the recycler it was.

Kind of sad to see it go, it's probably been one of our better buys car wise, but life moves on.

We're going to try having just one car for the time being despite living in a rural community with distinctly sketchy public transport. We can walk to the local shops, library and post office and consequently we don't drive the distances we used to, and we reckon we should be able to manage our calendars to share our car effectively ...

Weird weather we're having...

 A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what a mild winter we've been having.

Since then we've had a week of cold freezing sleety rain followed by a week of even colder overnight temperatures and cold clear blue skies during the day - but cold though it is overnight, it climbs to the low to mid teens during the afternoon, warm enough to work outside in the garden for an hour or two.

The jonquils and daffodils are blooming, and the snowdrops are out, and the grass is beginning to look like its needs cutting again.

On the other hand our bower bird has abandoned his bower and gone wherever bower birds go to escape the cold. Despite the cold overnight temperatures it actually feels like early, very early, spring. with trees starting to bud and the broad beans poke their heads up.

I guess we can only wait and see...

A chilly day's cataloguing

 Up at the Athenaeum this morning for another cataloguing session.

Absolutely freezing with sleety rain making me wish I'd had the sense to wear a pair of my Swedish army surplus wool socks - light enough to wear with ordinary shoes yet infinitely warmer than regular socks.

First task of the day wasn't really cataloguing related, but I went round and removed all the old moth traps, and disposed of them. I'd planned to replace them with new ones - we are supposed to have them in stock, but they seem to have been hidden somewhere.

Given how cold it is at the moment I don't see any self respecting moth or other insect pest doing any damage just now but they obviously need to be replaced before spring.

Other than that it was simply more of the same cataloguing the collection.

No real finds this week, other than what would have been a nice example of early Australian book publishing from 1888 - a copy of This Wicked World by Caroline Emily Cameron (who usually published as either Mrs H Lovett Cameron, or simply Mrs Lovett Cameron).

Unfortunately it has been professionally rebound, meaning that the original cover and binding is missing, which is a pity, as intact it would have been an almost unique example of early Australian publishing.

Other early books catalogued today were an 1867 copy of A Lady's Confession by Pamela, Lady Campbell, and an 1888 reprint of Wilkie Collins' After Dark, otherwise it was a fairly predictable mixture of post world war two and early 1900's fiction ...