Agewell Social Network at The Lawns.

An introduction to social networking, including Facebook.

Do you want to learn how to keep in contact with family and friends the 21st century way?

Join Digital Men for this series of four workshops exploring productive and safe ways of using social networking web sites such as Facebook.

Workshop topics include …

• An overview of social media and networks.
• Joining and using Facebook – What is it? How do you get connected?
• Understanding Facebook security and privacy issues.
• Facebook content – your profile, photographs, video.
• Facebook activities – friends, groups, pages, search.

Who is it for?

This is for you – if you are a mid-life man (aged 50 to 65), resident in Hackney.

You should also have an email account that you know how to use, and be able to access it as webmail without help.

When and where.

The workshops will be held on Thursday afternoons (3.30 to 6 pm), beginning 5 May and ending 26 May 2011.

The venue will be 52 The Lawns, Matthias Road, N16 8QB.

How to sign up.

For more information, or to book a place, please email julietformby@ageconcernhackney.org.uk .

To secure a place we are asking for a £5 deposit refundable on completion of the workshops.

Digital men – what’s that?

Digital Men is part of the Forward Thinking Programme that supports better planning and preparation for a fuller and richer later life.

AgeUK London Blog.

In their own words:

Age UK London has launched a new blogging site to support and enhance its campaigning and policy work. The blog features senior staff from Age UK London and local Age UKs / Age Concerns, all blogging about the big issues affecting older people in London. Any issue is up for discussion but the focus will predominately be on later life in London.

URL: http://www.ageuklondonblog.org.uk/ .

A message from Jason Murphy, MyHeartLog …

NB from Agewell:
This could be a really good opportunity to extend our activities at The Lawns, while doing something useful and interesting. So if you would like to be involved, tell Jason ASAP!

Workshop: Tuesday 29 March 2011 (3 to 4.30 pm).

This is another ‘popular request’ workshop! Our purpose will be to help you answer this perennial question …

So it will be more than yet another ‘email attachments’ workshop. The problem that people have with email attachments is the same as the problem they have getting a profile photo to Facebook and other web sites.

This workshop will be suitable for anyone who has an email address, including beginners. We will provide plenty of images to experiment with – but if you have a photo that you want to attach to an email or upload to a web site, please bring it on a flash drive.

Also on the same day …

• Exercise session for computer users, 12 to 1 pm.
• Drop-in from 1.30 to 4.30 pm, as usual.
• First Click course for new beginners, 1.15 to 2.45 pm.

One of the results of our most recent Facebook workshop is an update of our Facebook notes in PDF format.

There are two main documents, both can be downloaded from our Dropbox list Facebook section …

• How to join Facebook – privacy notes for senior citizens.pdf .
• Facebook security and privacy – notes for senior citizens.pdf .

The second one is the more important – 20 pages of detailed suggestions on how to avoid getting into a mess on Facebook. We think we have covered everything, including how to stop the flood of unwanted Facebook emails.

We also had a request to find the page where you can delete your Facebook account (recommended for everyone who has decided they don’t need it): Delete your Facebook account (you should log in first).

Agewell Computer Club supports AgeUk’s Myfriends online week (21 to 27 March 2011) …

So instead of our regular weekly workshop, on Tuesday 22 March 2011 (3 to 4.30 pm) we will have an open drop-in session with a Social Internet theme – more or less what we would do anyway, but without the need to book in advance.

At 3 pm, Peter McConville from myheartlog.org will be here to talk about their new social network: ‘a developing web community that promotes support and socialisation amongst people with an interest in heart wellbeing’. They are based in Hackney, just down the road from us. More info about them in our post Wanted: Web users with a lot of heart.

After that, what we do will depend on the wishes of the people who turn up. Most likely we will be looking at Skype, Facebook and email. If you have any suggestions or requests, please email them to acc@lawns.org.uk .

Also on the same day …

• Exercise session for computer users, 12 to 1 pm.
• Drop-in from 1.30 to 4.30 pm, as usual.
• First Click course for new beginners, 1.15 to 2.45 pm.

Workshop: Tuesday 15 March 2011 (3 to 4.30 pm).

By popular request – another workshop for Facebook beginners, focussing primarily on privacy and security issues, secondarily on uploading photos and how to add people to your Facebook Friends list.

Facebook is the most popular social networking site amongst our members, probably because it is so useful for maintaining informal links with family and friends around the world. But we have noticed an undercurrent of anxiety about how safe it is. In fact, it is not difficult to lock down your Facebook account for maximum privacy, but you have to be a fairly experienced user to understand whether what you have done is sufficient. We will look at that first.

Prerequisite level.

• This is not an advanced workshop, but participants should have a Facebook account, and should know their login email address and their password (please practice logging in before the workshop).

Some Facebook links.

• Facebook login and signup page.

Privacy.

• 20 Facebook privacy settings tips.
• Dispelling The Myths Of Facebook Privacy And Security.
• Facebook Privacy Scanner.
• Facebook Privacy: 10 Must-Know Security Settings.
• Facebook Privacy: 10 Settings Every User Needs to Know.
• Facebook Privacy: 4 Valuable Yet Hard to Find Settings.
• Facebook security best practices.
• Know Your Way Around Facebook Privacy.
• The 10 Facebook Privacy Settings You Need To Know.

Also on the same day …

• Exercise session for computer users, 12 to 1 pm.
• Drop-in from 1.30 to 4.30 pm, as usual.
• First Click taster for new beginners, 1.15 to 2.45 pm.

Workshop: Tuesday 8 March 2011 (3 to 4.30 pm).

At this workshop, we will continue our quest for the ideal blogging platform for Agewell Computer Club members. It’s time to take a closer look at Tumblr.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about Tumblr …

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use.

Don’t know what that means? Look at our own demo Tumblr blog (agewellcc.tumblr.com) instead. The posts are all short and succinct — notes, links, photos, video clips, questions & answers — and all of them (except the video) were published without logging into the Tumblr site. They were published by sending an email. It could hardly be easier – if you can send an email, you can run a Tumblr blog – and if you can send an email attachment, you can publish photographs and photo-slideshows on your blog.

There is a lot more (visit the Tumblr site to find out).

What we will do at the workshop.

• Get everyone signed up at Tumblr.
• Show you how to publish text and images on our blog by email (or mobile phone).
• Show you how to publish by logging into Tumblr.
• Get you started on your own Tumblr blog (even if you already have another blog, you can use the Tumblr micro-blog to make links to your other posts).
• Create a group blog where you can publish Agewell photos and video (look at our page ‘Some Tumblr themes for ACC’ for ideas on what it might look like).

Links.

• Tumblr sign-up.
• Tumblr log-in.
• Agewell Computer Club on Tumblr (demo site).
• Agewell Computer Club Corkboard (our free-for-all members blog).

Prerequisite level.

• This is not an advanced workshop, but participants should be reasonably confident using a web browser and online email.

Also on the same day …

• Exercise session for computer users, 12 to 1 pm.
• Drop-in from 1.30 to 4.30 pm, as usual.
• Our First Click course for beginners will start at 1.15 pm and end at 2.45 pm.

Workshop: Tuesday 15 February 2011 (3 to 4.30 pm).

A blog is an interactive website belonging to an individual person, an organisation, a community or a campaign. ‘Interactive’ means the website is not just there to be read. Bloggers expect  and hope that other people will join in, leave comments, get involved in discussion, or even contribute articles of their own. Blogs are now a hugely important feature of the Internet, so you really should know what they are and how they work.

Participants will not necessarily become bloggers (that is not the purpose of the workshop) – but we will give you an opportunity to …

• add your comments to community websites set up by other Agewell in Hackney members, who will be here to show you what they do;
• become an ‘author’ at We Seniors, so you can experiment with the simple WordPress editing tools used by millions of bloggers and website owners.

Prerequisite level.

• This is not an advanced workshop, but participants should be reasonably confident using a web browser and online email.

Some blog links.

• Hackney and neighbours.
• Other places and lives.

Also on the same day …

• Drop-in from 1.30 to 4.30 pm, as usual.
• Our First Click course for beginners will start at 1.15 pm and end at 2.45 pm.

A message forwarded from Age UK London …

A message from Kate Roberts, Age UK …

NB from Agewell Computer Club: this sounds like a really interesting and worthwhile afternoon – so please contact Kate as soon as you read this! Please mention Agewell in Hackney, so she knows where you are coming from.

A message from Gillian Lawrence …

Gillian blogs at upyourstreet.wordpress.com .

Workshop: Tuesday 25 January 2011 (3 to 4.30 pm).

We haven’t had an email workshop since April 2010. We get asked more questions about email than anything else, so it’s about time we had another one. This workshop will not be advanced – it will be for beginners, and others who feel they are not quite on top of it all.

At the workshop, we will try to deal with general principles as well as specific problems raised by participants – so they should leave with a better understanding of how email works, not just what buttons to click in their own email system.

We will be demonstrating email with the seniors.org.uk email package that most new Agewell Computer Club members use. People with email addresses at gmail.com (or googlemail.com) will be OK with what they have. Others – we will set you up with a seniors.org.uk email account.

Also on the same day …

• Drop-in from 1.30 to 4.30 pm, as usual.
• Our new First Click course for beginners (session 2) will start at 1.15 pm and end at 2.45 pm.

Workshop: Tuesday 2 November 2010 (3 pm to 5 pm).

Have you got something to say? Is there something you want to change? Are you looking for a way to bring people together?

At this workshop we will introduce our talk about local project. If you want to get a voice heard for your neighbourhood or community, or help members of your community to know each other better, or gather support for a local campaign on things like community safety, health, wellbeing, environment, housing, transport, local issues – we will give you everything you need. You don’t need to know a lot about computers or the Internet – we will set you up, show you what to do, and provide support afterwards.

Beginners are welcome!

This project is aimed at people who have never done anything like this before. Computer skills are not the most important thing – if you can use email, you can do this too. Websites like these are easy!  We will take care of all the technical stuff, so you can concentrate on your community.

Bring your ideas to the workshop.

No community is too small!

Your area could be a street, an estate, a conservation area, a ward, the Borough you live in, the whole of London – or it could be as small as a single block of flats. Your community could be everybody who lives in your area – or it could be people with particular interests, needs or shared experience.

We have listed some examples of local community websites on our page ‘Hackney and neighbours’.

What we will do at the workshop.

We don’t expect you to create a website at the workshop. Our aim is to help you plan a community website that we will help you build in the next few weeks. There will be extra workshops specifically for that purpose, probably on Monday or Tuesday afternoons.

Are you more interested in personal blogging?

Join our new We Seniors site.

Also on the same day …

• Our opening times will be 2 pm to 5 pm. This is for one day only.
• Our beginners’ session will start at 2 pm. We will do whatever the beginners want to do.
• Skype on a flash drive (memory stick): if you would like Skype loaded on your flash drive, please bring it before the workshop starts.

The photos in this post are courtesy of Hackney Plus.

Workshop: Tuesday 26 October 2010 (11.30 am to 1.30 pm).

This workshop picks up some of the conclusions from our June 2010 workshop ‘Make your own website or blog’ – particularly that some of most popular free blogging sites are not as user-friendly as they might be. So we have made our own.

We Seniors.

We Seniors is a sister site for our highly successful seniors.org.uk email service (more than 270 local users). Just as anyone can have a seniors.org.uk email address, anyone can have a We Seniors username and create their own personal blog. So if there is anything you would like to put on the World Wide Web (opinions, advice, personal history, jokes, advice, photographs – anything that is yours), this is a place where you can do it. We have designed this new blogging system to be as easy as possible for you to read, navigate and use. We will provide all the technical support and backup.

At the workshop.

At the workshop, we will get you started – signed up, and hopefully at least one ‘post’ by all of the participants. Reserve your place now by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk — and please remember to say why you are sending the email!

Also on the same day …

As usual, our beginners’ session will start at 10 am. We will probably do more email practice, and perhaps make a start on the new BBC WebWise online courses.

Workshop: Tuesday 19 October 2010 (11.30 am to 1.30 pm).

Speakup Hackney — a voice for users of health services in Hackney and the City — has been relaunched with a new domain name (‘speakuphackney.org’), and a serious intent to engage local people in discussion about the future of local health and care services. Your views expressed on the website will be a part of consultation of local people — fed back to local decision makers, who really do listen!

Your voice!

At this workshop (at The Lawns as usual) we will show you how to …

• Sign up as a Speakup Hackney ‘subscriber’ — so you can add your comments and questions to articles posed by other people.
• Become a Speakup Hackney ‘contributor’ — tell us about your own experiences, ideas and aspirations — be one of the people stimulating discussion about the services which affect all of us.

Who should come to the workshop?

Everyone! You do not need advanced computer skills to join in. If you can write an email, you can do this!

Also on the same day …

• Our opening and closing times will be shifted forward by one hour. We won’t open until 11 am.
• More Skype — people who attended our Skype workshop last week might want to bring their laptops back for some practice. We can copy the portable Skype setup to your flash drive if you bring it in. There is more information about that in our post Starting with Skype.