BYTING THE BULLET : Senior Citizens Are Signing On to Information Age Technology
Computers are not just for kids, according to Leisure World resident Herb Rosner.
Since buying a personal computer of his own recently, Rosner has become hooked: He set up a database to keep track of family birthdays and other vital statistics, bought a bridge program to help his wife, Helen, learn the game and joined two computer user clubs.
“The ability to work with computers has added a rich new dimension to my life,” Rosner said. “It opened a new world of possibilities for me.”
Rosner, 69, got his introduction to computers through a Saddleback College class offered at the Leisure World retirement community in Laguna Hills.
Senior citizens also can plug into the electronic age through a new program at Cal State Fullerton. In March, the college opened the doors of the county’s first SeniorNet computer center, only the second such center in Southern California.
The center, which has five personal computers and a laser printer, is in the Ruby Gerontology Center on campus and is operated through the university’s Continuing Learning Experience program. It not only offers computer courses taught by senior citizens for senior citizens, it also offers its users a chance to connect with other older adults across the country over the SeniorNet electronic network.
SeniorNet, the brainchild of University of San Francisco professor Mary Furlong, is a national nonprofit computer network that offers a growing number of users access to databases that collect information of interest to senior citizens. In addition, its users can take advantage of features such as electronic mail and open forums to do anything from trading recipes to lobbying lawmakers.
Jeffry Young, associate director of the Ruby Gerontology Center, said he hopes to make the Cal State Fullerton SeniorNet site the hub of a consortium of personal computer “kiosks” located any place in the county where senior citizens gather--libraries, nursing homes, senior centers, even doctors’ offices.
In fact, the SeniorNet program has already begun stirring interest--more than 120 senior citizens have expressed interest in the Cal State Fullerton computer classes, which begin in June.
“We don’t want to be left behind,” said Nikki Reece of Fullerton, a 73-year-old computer novice who has signed up for the introductory class.
“We’re trying to prove that seniors are as smart as kids,” said Ted Smith, 72, also of Fullerton, who hopes that the SeniorNet classes will help him use a computer in his part-time consulting business.
The idea behind the program is to bring “wisdom to the information age,” Furlong said in a telephone interview. “The older adults in this country are a very important resource, and SeniorNet can give seniors access to each other and to everybody.”
One of Furlong’s goals is to create a vast “electronic city,” something to help senior citizens overcome the isolation that many older Americans suffer. “The people most in need of information services are those with limited mobility,” Furlong said. For those in nursing or rest homes in particular, she added, “this does represent their window on the world.”
Young said that many older adults find it difficult to cope with the role losses--parenting and career--that typically come with aging. “You’ve lost the two major things that define you,” Young said. “Later life is a time of new roles.” A computer system with a networking feature may ease the transition to these new roles, bringing them into focus.
“This is a way of really plugging them in and keeping them actively involved with life,” said Craig MacDonald, an area manager for Pacific Bell. The company gave a $12,000 grant for the Fullerton SeniorNet site and also sponsored a SeniorNet center in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Two sections of the SeniorNet introductory computer course will be offered at Cal State Fullerton in June, and two more will be offered in July. The classes meet twice weekly for 4 weeks. At the end of August, 12 classes will be offered, covering an introduction to computers, word processing, spreadsheets and telecommunications.
(Registration costs are included in the membership fees for Continuing Learning Experience; the fees are $40 for the summer or $55 per regular semester. Non-members are charged a fee of $25 per class. Membership in SeniorNet is $10 for individuals, $15 for couples. The Fullerton computer lab is open for use outside class hours free to SeniorNet students and Continuing Learning Experience members.)
SeniorNet was begun in 1986 with five sites. It now has 25, from Framingham, Mass., in the East to Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. (There also is one in Calgary, Canada.) There are two in Southern California; the other is in a doctor’s office in San Diego. Senior citizens who have their own personal computers and modems can take part in SeniorNet at home as individual members.
In addition to keeping up with the latest developments in drug research or Social Security legislation, SeniorNet users can also converse electronically with fellow users, either through an open forum or through private electronic mail. They can peruse the electronic membership directory for other users with similar interests. The most popular subjects, Young said, are genealogy and ham radio.
One of Furlong’s highest hopes is for SeniorNet to become a way for older Americans to become plugged into the political power structure, a mechanism to organize and mobilize the country’s estimated 35 million senior citizens on matters such as Social Security or Medicare legislation that would affect them directly.
Because modems are becoming more common in legislative offices, senior citizens could act quickly on a particular matter by sending letters electronically.
“Instead of saying, ‘I’m frustrated; I’m going to send a letter sometime,’ by gosh, you can bash it out and send it instantly,” MacDonald said. “You can plug into legislators and let them know what you think, (and) get together with other seniors across the country and lobby certain issues.”
SeniorNet does have a lobbyist in Washington monitoring legislation, and network users have already flexed their political muscle, having recently helped to defeat, by organizing a letter-writing campaign, a Federal Communications Commission proposal to levy a surcharge on modem communications.
Computers are usually thought of as something for younger people to be concerned with. Many older Americans had already retired before the computer revolution had really taken hold in the workplace.
Before he retired as a full-time businessman, Ted Smith had worked often with numbers and reports generated by computers, but he had never had any hands-on experience with the machines themselves. “I kept wishing I was familiar with it,” said Smith, whose children and grandchildren are all computer-literate. “You just can’t grow up anymore without it.”
Many older adults lack even the most basic understanding of computers, said Sol Pollack, who teaches an introductory Saddleback College computer class at Leisure World.
Pollack, who is 74, is a retired Pepperdine University professor who taught computer-related courses. He began teaching programming and word-processing classes at Leisure World about 4 years ago, and he started the introductory class when he discovered that “people were coming in without any knowledge of computers.”
With the help of a special projector that displays the computer screen on the wall, about 25 students a semester learn about the basic operation of a personal computer. Most, Pollack said, have no intention of buying a computer--they just want to learn more about them. Out of a typical class, he said, “three or four get interested enough to buy a computer.”
Programs such as SeniorNet and the Leisure World classes help make it easier for older adults to enter the computer age because they offer settings in which the students can learn from and with their peers.
“It’s important in learning that you make mistakes,” Young said. For senior citizens, he said, “to start something fresh involves this risk-taking and the ability to make mistakes freely, and to an extent there is a little inter-generational tension where you don’t want to look more stupid than the kids.”
Learning from peers and with peers helps to ease that tension, he said. Young only oversees the Fullerton computer lab, for the most part turning over the day-to-day operations to two site coordinators--Bill Farrand and Harry Dolby, both senior citizens. “Just get out of the way and they’ll do fine,” Young said. “It avoids the premise of helplessness or inability.”
A fear of complex, fast-changing technology can also be a discouraging factor. Young told a story about his own mother’s apprehensions: despite having operated sophisticated medical and office equipment all her professional life, she refused to learn about computers once she had retired. Three years later, however, her opposition had softened, and she signed up for a computer course at a community college. Now she has a computer of her own, which she uses to keep a log of the ships that pass by her home in the San Juan Islands of Washington state.
Such fears are easily overcome, said Farrand, who is a retired computer scientist. “They start out with a big bag of concern that they won’t be able to understand, and they find out quickly that they can understand, and then that they can become facile, and then that it can become useful,” he said.
In fact, many senior citizens learn more quickly than younger students, largely because they have the time to devote to practicing and because they are taking the classes by their own choice. “They don’t do it to add to their resumes. They do it because it’s fun,” Furlong said. “What unites them is their desire to continue learning.”
“It sounds like fun to make friends across the country,” said Reece. She wants to learn word processing and desktop publishing, she said, to help in putting out the Continuing Learning Experience newsletter, of which she is editor. Computers, she has come to realize, are here to stay: “Pretty soon they’ll be like iceboxes and typewriters: Every home will have one.”
