Ros Foskey, Institute for Rural Futures, University of New England Armidale.
This presentation will highlight two projects of the Institute for Rural Futures, University of New England that have made use of information and communications technology in a creative and innovative way to connect with sections of the community who are often perceived as being difficult to reach.
On 8th November 2001 Mature Men Matter, a workshop for men aged 45 years and over living in north western NSW, used video-conference to connect forty seven men from Armidale, Inverell, Moree and Gunnedah in a single event with additional links enabling presentations from men's health and learning experts based in Western Sydney and Canberra. The workshop included involvement from both indigenous and non-indigenous men from the region and was based around a discussion paper of the NSW Committee on Ageing Keeping the Balance: Older Men and Healthy Ageing. This section of the presentation will include a video clip. The presentation will also highlight what, if any, developments have occurred within the New England North West region as an outcome of that initial video-conference based workshop.
The second part of the presentation will discuss the integration of video-conference and chat sessions into a pilot retirement education program specifically targeting the farm sector. Video-conference has been used to involve a range of presenters in a training program for volunteer farm retirement advisors. The first training program in October 2001 made use of the greypath.com virtual village site with permission of the site management. Growing from this initial success a series of chat sessions for the broader farming community are planned between February and June 2002 and will link two projects of the Institute for Rural Futures, Opening the Farm Gateway sponsored by Networking the Nation and Older Farmers and Retirement a project sponsored by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries Australia. The chat sessions will involve collaboration with peak Australian farming organisations including National Farmers Association and NSW Farmers Association as well as the rural media, seniors organisations, and seniors web sites. It is expected that this section of the conference presentation will feature a video clip.