TAO - Third Age Online - Community & Collaboration

The main target of the research project "TAO - Third Age Online - Community & Collaboration" is the development, testing and researching of new ICT-based solutions as "Ambient Assisted Living Systems" to encourage elderly people to social interaction and new activities. Elderly people should use ICT for online collaboration and social networking in online-communities. Together with older people different project activities (for example senior-authors for wikipedia) will be developed with a special focus on their needs, requirements and problems. Strategies, guidelines and recommendations will be explored by action research. The project's foremost objective is to bring about a win-win-win-situation: It is expected that elderly people profit in terms of social capital and human capital (health and well-being but also skills and knowledge), improved possibilities for online activities. Also a larger array of online content which is targeted to their needs is expected. The expected profit for existing online communities is increased participation (leading to savings of cots which allow the satisfaction of "niche interests") as well as a qualitative improvement of their "products" and/or their social interactions. And finally, it is expected that the society as a whole will profit from improved social and human capital among seniors, from improved inter-generational relations as well as from the expected boost in "open" production and the creation of new opportunities for elderly people to use their knowledge and rich life experience. ZAWiW is one of the research partners together with the University of Applied Sciences Bern (CH), UNU-MERIT (NL-Maastricht) and Zeix AG (CH-Zurich); the main partners for the activities are Wikimedia Germany, Wikimedia Switzerland, SeniorWeb Switzerland and Seniorweb Netherlands. ZAWiW will cooperate with the "ViLE-Netzwerk", "Netzwerk SII Baden-Württemberg", "Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Baden-Württemberg" and the " Institut ILEU e.V.". The research and activities from ZAWiW for TAO will be funded from Federal Ministry for Education and Research, the European Commission, Förderkreis des ZAWiW and others.

Part of TAO is the project "Silberwissen" (Silver knowledge), carried out in Germany. German description here.

Duration: 01.10.2010 - 30.09.2013

Further information:
www.thirdageonline.eu
TAO short description
TAO-Handbook

Contact at ZAWiW:
Markus Marquard
E-Mail: markus.marquard@uni-ulm.de
Linda Grieser
E-Mail: linda.grieser@uni-ulm.de
Jan-Mathis Schnurr
E-Mail: jan-mathis.schnurr(at)uni-ulm.de