Digital Television as a Usable Platform for Enhancement of Learning Possibilities for the Elderly

Abstract

The use of television (TV) for learning purposes has been a topic of interest for several decades. Although digital TV represents a highly up-and-coming platform for education, there is a plethora of issues from various areas. The primary goal of this article is to present details associated with the investigation of how elderly as a distinctive group of users perceive the usability of t-learning applications while communicating by diverse types of interaction tools and t-learning applications. These applications are focused on cognitive training, physical education, and game-like application dealing with building of family trees. A total of 119 subjects attended in the experiment. All participants participated in a group of appointments that involved 24 sessions for almost 3 months. The activity during these individual sessions demanded from 20 to 30 min of time, accumulating to between 8 and 12 hr in total. There were three hypotheses tested, focused on usability, and influence of age and gender. Evaluation of usability uncovers that t-learning applications have a higher chance of acceptance by the elderly when the content deals with mentally oriented tasks rather than physical exercise. In this way, it is proved that t-learning does not represent a suitable platform for stimulation of the elderly to undertake physical exercise.

Digital Competences in the Elderly and University Students: Didactic Interaction from the Use of Social Networks

“…Social networks have impregnated two types of placebo: (a) reinforcement of digital skills little practiced by the participants, (b) training of totally obsolete capacities in subjects unfamiliar with 4g technology, or other computer environments. These evidences make it possible to clarify that the subjects have developed Digital Competencies thanks to the development of social communication through the use of networks [5-23-24], as fluency was also increased when using technological tools [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], as did the young university students in their interaction with adults. The activities of the Semillero Project were based on generating interrelationships between people in digital communities (family or social) to achieve more continuous, powerful relationships that favor memory in people who use these technologies very little in their daily lives.…”