Middle-Aged Group: Digital Divide Could Affect Parent-Child Relationship
The team addressing digital divide issues amongst middle-aged housewives primarily focused on how the digital divide affected the relationship between children and themselves.
As housewives, their primary concerns revolve around the family relationship and daily housework. In this day and age of computers, it is so easy for children develop online communication habits and indulge in digital interaction. On the other hand, parents are usually uninformed of how to use digital means of communication, especially those from low-income families who did not grow up with computers. As a consequence, a clear digital gap exists between parents and their kids when parents have no idea about online applications or computer usage.
In order to improve this issue, there is a need to equip parents with better computer skills. Hence, our team organized a course to teach housewives from low-income family how to type in Chinese and introduce basic computer usage to them. The 12 participants who signed up reflected their dire need to develop basic computer skills in order to better communicate with their children, and they were also interested in how the Internet could help ease their housework. Even though the course was simple, we hoped that it would first eliminate their fear of using computers. Ambassadors from other teams also came to help, and provided their own personal laptops for the classes.
We were pleasantly surprised with the progress they made within the 3 consecutive classes. They started from being completely ignorant of Chinese input methods, to understanding how thousands of Chinese characters are generated from just 26 digits on the keyboard. It was interesting how being able to type their names, their kids' and husbands' names gave them such a sense of satisfaction. They also learnt how to use the internet browser to search for supermarkets and prices. In addition, most of the housewives came with their kids, which was a great opportunity for parent-child interaction.
We ambassadors believe that the project not only brought practical computer skills to the housewives, but also proved that what the middle-aged group lacked is opportunity and not ability. We are glad we could devote our knowledge and love to build a more caring society.
數碼鴻溝容易衍生親子關係問題
親 子關係和瑣碎家務才是中年家庭婦女的生活重心。隨著互聯網技術的進步，兒童已逐漸形成利用網絡進行交流和互動的習慣。我們也發現了因溝通渠道的分歧而衍生 的親子之間的數碼鴻溝，為了解決這個問題，网域使命中年小組的成員籌劃了以家庭婦女為對象的工作坊，教授十二位媽媽們打字和基本的電腦網絡操作，從而提高 她們對電腦和網絡的認知。利用在互聯網中學到的知識，媽媽們在今後與子女的溝通中能夠有更多的話題，家務也能更輕鬆。
工作坊持續了三個星期，每個星期一堂課，媽媽們在其中的進步超乎我們的想像。她們掌握了怎樣把複雜的中文轉化成26個鍵盤字母，也學會了打自己的名字，兒女及丈夫的名字等等。最讓我們印象深刻的，是一位媽媽帶自己十歲的小女兒來上課，小女孩學得很快，還經常手把手地當起媽媽的小老師。這樣的親子互動讓我們感動，也是達到了我們工作坊最大的初衷——親子共融。當課程結束，看到“學生們”自豪又滿意的笑臉，我們嚐到了成功的喜悅。
感謝所有參加中年組工作坊的媽媽們，對她們來說，從繁忙的工作及家務中抽出時間學習並非易事。希望在日後，我們能有機會幫助更多的家庭，縮減親子間的數碼鴻溝。
