New technology-themed institute brings tech-hungry seniors downtown – Palo Alto Online

New technology-themed institute brings tech-hungry seniors downtown – Palo Alto Online

Gaye Courtney, left, and Maybelle Freeman learn how to use an iPad during a class by Senior Planet, a technology-themed organization aimed at keeping older adults up to date on the latest trends. Avenidas@450Bryant in Palo Alto is the only location on the west coast to house the New York-based organization’s satellite program. Photo by Sammy Dallal.

Downtown Palo Alto has been a longtime mecca for tech startups, and now it could be a destination for retired tech workers and other older adults hungry to know the latest trends.

Avenidas@450Bryant is the only west coast location where New York-based Senior Planet has opened a satellite hub specifically aimed at keeping older adults up to date on technology. The technology-themed institute, which opened its doors at the senior center last summer, offers classes on everything from iPad basics, smartphone photography and social media to more advanced topics such as cryptocurrency, net neutrality, fake news, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and privacy and security. The institute also hosts live-streamed watch parties on various topics — including the upcoming “Myths about sex and aging” scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 11 — and is stocked with iPads, laptops, a 3-D printer, a PlayStation 4, a Nintendo Switch and virtual reality consoles that give seniors a hands-on opportunity to have fun with new devices.

Ryan Kawamoto, the Senior Planet regional director who sits in the Palo Alto office, described the program as a “social change model” focused on how technology can empower a person to do more.

“It’s not just how to turn on and off an iPad, but how to use it for financial planning,” Kawamoto said. “We’re seeing a lot of quality of life issues — how to use Facetime, how to put birthdays on your smartphone or calendar, how to use Google calendar to balance a very busy lifestyle.”

He said the program’s curriculum model, along with tech support from the New York headquarters, make the courses more current and practical than traditional classes; they also attract participants with varying levels of prior knowledge, including those who have very limited knowledge to experienced tech users who might have worked at or helped to launch Silicon Valley companies.

“It’s a great community resource,” said Roberta Kehret, a longtime Palo Alto resident, who is working her way through several Senior Planet classes, including iPhone photography. “What I appreciate is that our senior center here is so different than across the country. In the Midwest they have things like Bingo, but this — the variety of classes and the areas that are covered — is like going to a community college.”

Kehret said she now has a better understanding of privacy settings and social networks and is learning how to transfer what she knows how to do on her iPad onto her cell phone.

Avenidas CEO Amy Andonian said Avenidas was one of the first senior centers in the country to launch technology training for seniors decades ago, but declining participation in those traditional classes led her to search for a more engaging program.

She decided on Senior Planet, offering the group prime space at the senior center’s newly renovated and expanded downtown building.

“Senior Planet made a name for itself by focusing not on technology for the sake of technology but on how tech can be a tool to empower people in different areas of their lives — health and wellness, art and creative expression, financial literacy, civic engagement and social connection,” Andonian said. “For example, how do you meet people when you’re older? Online dating is the norm. Or maybe you want to lose 15 pounds. A Fitbit could be a good way of tracking your activity, or maybe you form a walking group and have a contest on steps. So it’s not about the Fitbit per se, but about the broader life goals.”

Andonian said classes can even be tailored to address local interests.

The Senior Planet site in New York, she explained, launched a class focused on online dating after a group of seniors expressed interest in it.

“They were all single and wanted to get into the dating scene,” she said.

Just like the New York site, Kawamoto said he plans to customize future course offerings in Palo Alto.

For all the tech talk, Kawamoto said, “The most-read articles on the Senior Planet website are the sex ones.”

The watch party for Joan Ryan’s talk, “Debunking the Seven Myths About Sex and Aging,” will be 4-5:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 11, at Senior Planet@Avenidas. To RSVP, email rsvp@seniorplanetavenidas.org. For more information on Senior Planet, go to seniorplanet.org.

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2 people like this

Posted by Yay! (maybe)
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
6 hours ago

I’m thrilled to see a Senior Planet here, but this doesn’t seem like what I read about in Technology Review about the one in New York
Web Link

“Roughly one in five arrive wanting to use technology to work and make money”

“Kamber’s nonprofit has created a platform of sorts to empower those seniors to “uncork their lives.””

But notice they talk about the Palo Alto Senior Planet in the article, too, and it doesn’t jive with the description above.

The article also points out that
“The ageism of the era is perhaps best exemplified by Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous assertion back in 2007 that “young people are just smarter,”
… The drop-off was particularly marked for older women; the researchers speculated—depressingly, but not surprisingly—that women’s physical appearance is more important in service-related careers, and women’s physical aging was judged more harshly than men’s.”

This despite the fact that another article in the same issue points out that the fastest growing startups are begun by people with an average age of 45 and 50-year-old founder is almost twice as likely to start a successful startup than a 30-year-old found.

Senior Planet is supposedly helping seniors to combat all that. I don’t think a few classes in which the seniors are treated like children is going to do that.

So, personally, I really am not interested in classes. I would really love to go in an get help with my website, and creating a more steady income stream so I can afford an assistant. The things I could do if I had an assistant!! I would love to get help with a more reliable research paper database and citation manager, one that doesn’t become obsolete every few months to anyone who isn’t part of a big organization with tech support. I would love help finding a way to complete my PhD which I had to leave when I was younger because of unforeseen events, but in a way that doesn’t require unnecessary hoop jumping. A dissertation-only PhD. And help finding financing for it.

As an analogy, it’s the difference between taking a screenwriting course that tells you how to write a screenplay (from which very few scripts result) and a course that helps you write it. I want the latter. I want to be able to get help when I have questions that crop of in service of my DOING something, which is exactly what that first article talked about. We seniors need something that plays to OUR strengths, not the strengths of young people who have more energy do deal with unnecessary arcana.

Tech savvy seniors today have had to learn and relearn something completely new every few years, and very little of it introduced with any regard for the importance of maintaining workflow or the impact on people’s time. A lot of seniors don’t want to deal with new technology because it’s just a time sink that doesn’t buy them anything. How many versions of Word does one really need in life? (Hey, anyone want to start a new computer company with me? Let’s make one that saves people TIME over the attention sucking bricks everyone else is selling….) I’d like to volunteer to resurrect Eudora now that the code has been open-sourced, only make it work with IMAP better. (No productivity tool since has ever come close.) But I’d like to get up to speed quickly on the skills rather than taking years of classes.

In other words, I have lots of work and hobby technology goals, and taking a bunch of time-consuming classes downtown assumes I have a lot of time on my hands and nothing better to do. The article talks about support seniors to get things done with the urgency they feel with less time — what about that?

I LOVE that Senior Planet has come here, please tell me it hasn’t been watered down from the one in New York here in the hear of Silicon Valley?

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