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ICT, education and older people in Australia: A socio-technical analysis

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Abstract

People over 65 (or older people) are a growing proportion of the population in many developed countries including Australia. In the last 10 to 12 years interest from this group in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet has also grown considerably. ICT has much to offer older people as a means of keeping in touch with family, perhaps in other parts of the world, to obtain information about health and financial matters, for entertainment and to further their education. It also offers possibilities for intergenerational cooperation with, for example, children coaching their grandparents. This paper concentrates on older people’s use of ICT for education, some of this being formal but mostly informal, and adopts a socio-technical framework based on actor-network theory (ANT) to investigate this.

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  1. Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

    Arthur Tatnall

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  1. Arthur Tatnall
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Correspondence to Arthur Tatnall.

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Tatnall, A. ICT, education and older people in Australia: A socio-technical analysis. Educ Inf Technol 19, 549–564 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-013-9300-x

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