Project outcomes

• The project will recruit and train of at least 100 Digital Activists (volunteers)
• Study trips to transnational partner organisations
• A diverse suite of tools will be developed to support digital engagement with the communities of place, interest and identity targeted within the project
• The team of Digital Activists will be supported to engage over 3000 digitally excluded individuals in activities to promote e-inclusion
• Creation of DAIN community learning environment and virtual conferences
• At least 175 community based ICT courses per year
• An action research model of design and delivery will record and evaluate the project methodology, methods and outcomes
• Development of a regional Digital Inclusion Network to enable free sharing of information, good practice and resources
• In the last year of the project all the above will culminate in extensive dissemination activities at local, regional, national and international levels

Partners

UK Partners:

Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)

National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE)

CEFET

Plus lots of smaller local organisations that we work in partnership with and who host local DAIN ICT drop in and outreach sessions.

Transnational Partners:

ILI/FIM (Institut fur Lern-Innovation FIM Neues Lernen)
[Institute for Innovation in e-learning], Germany

EifEl ( European Intitute For e-learning) France

Lambrakis Foundation Greece

Menon Network EIG, Belgium

Stiftung Digitale-Chancen, Germany

The objectives of the DAIN project transnational work are:

• To identify locations of good practice of engagement of excluded groups in learning and developing ICT skills
• To enable Digital Activists (DAs) to investigate and report back on these models, using web 2.0 and multimedia tools
• To enable DAs to participate in online communication and collaboration with partners and groups they have engaged with in member states
• To create content for the community learning environment (CLE), in the form of multimedia reports from study visits that promote examples of good practice

DAIN Project Methodology

 The DAIN project is based on an action research model of research, aiming to involve target community representatives in as many stages of design and delivery as possible.    The project model is built on the principles of widening participation and therefore embeds awareness of equality and diversity into all project activity.  The project is also structured to enable new and different partnerships to be developed during the life of the project in response to community context, opportunities and needs as they emerge.

 Action research can be defined in a range of ways, however this research team use the definition provided by the Institute for Community Research:

 ’Participatory action research engages the public in dialogue about issues that are of concern to them. Participatory action research is a partnership between the affected community and researcher where the community is actively involved in all phases of the research project: defining the problem, designing the research methodology, collecting data, and analyzing and disseminating results.’  (2008)

 Research methods:

All Digital Activists (volunteers) explore the aims of project in first 2 sessions of volunteer training course and throughout course including discussions about DAIN being an action research project, what this means, and how data will be captured.

Part of the DA role is to record their observations and activities undertaken during outreach and drop in sessions, both in quantative  and qualitative ways.

Quantative data include details of the sessions staffed, how many community members engaged, contact and demographic details, of community members etc.   

Qualitative data can be recorded in whichever ways volunteers are most comfortable using.  We are a digital inclusion project and therefore encourage use of technology for recording and sharing observations and experiences.  Possible formats include making posts or comments on the project blog, moodle forum discussions, newsletter articles, short films, photographs, or use of any other media format.  See for example a short film from David and Alison (Lincoln Digital Activists).

 For those less confident with these methods we also welcome more traditional paper based feedback.

Digital Activists are actively involved in shaping the research methods and tools that we use.  For example Digital Activists have:

•  designed surveys for use on transnational study trips
• fedback on usability of benchmarking surveys in order to pilot different versions better suited to local communities
• suggested ways to improve the collection of quantative data, including  creation of an online form and changes to online form questions