It has now been a week since I started volunteering for Rato – ADCC, and in that time I must say my perspective has already changed on certain topics.
Digital Literacy
I got to assist 2 training courses that Rato – ADCC gave to people of the community who came. The first course was on the use of AI like Gemini from Google and Google Lens. The course went quite well from what I could see, but I did notice a few things that were striking. Seniors have a tendency to freeze up when they don’t know how to do something on a computer. It seems they try to memorize by heart how websites works to navigate through them. This is a huge issue because websites are regularly updated to change their layout. It seems seniors have trouble converting what they learned on one website to another.
Just like how most people who play video games easily hop from one to another, using one form of technology should help use another. I suspect seniors have their habits like reading newspaper and struggle to change to the times. Besides having courses and practicing using digital technology regularly, I don’t see how they will improve.
Another thing that struck me was the implication of teaching them about AI. Google Lens is a great tool for scanning QR codes, finding objects online you spotted in the real world and translating text from one language to another (something I’ve been doing a lot recently). However, Gemini is another tool entirely. It’s a LLM (Large Language Model), capable of giving you advice and solving simple problems. But it isn’t perfect, and anyone using Gemini or ChatGPT should be aware of this. It can come up with wrong information and tell you it’s the truth. I don’t think those seniors are aware of the limitations of this tool, and that’s potentially dangerous.
On the right is an image of a response from Gemini a user got as recently as last week. This got significant media coverage especially given the fact this isn’t the first time Google has tried to improve the AI’s restrictions. I’m not mentioning this to say this is a bad tool to use, only that people must know its limits and act accordingly.
On Saturday I assisted Nuno with a training course in a local library on how to use tablets. Same story here, those seniors seemed to have trouble navigating through the U.I. (User Interface), and some despite having a recent phone which shared many common features. Another major issue I see is that passwords are becoming more and more at risk of being hacked. We now need to think of passphrases or random sequences of letters, numbers and signs and no longer use passwords. I use Bitwarden which I find great, but it takes time to learn. I think many people and especially seniors are at risk of being hacked or exploited online because of this.
All this makes me think it might be a good idea to make a website to train people to use basics aspects of a computer like a USB stick. In any case this was very interesting to see, and now I have to try to think of other tools I can help develop for Rato – ADCC to teach more people.
