Economic benefits of being online

The first report from Martha Lane Fox’s Digital Inclusion Task Force has highlighted the economic benefits of being online.
They have discovered that:

10 million adults in the UK have never been online and 4 million of these are socially excluded
the 1.8 million children currently digitally excluded could earn up to £10.8 billion in their lifetime if [...]

Digital Inclusion Statistics

This is a presentation delivered by Helen Milner to the National Digital Inclusion Conference in London on the 27 April 2009.  The slides contain a number of key statistics on the digital divide in the UK which you may find useful.

UK’s Digital Inclusion Champion: Martha Lane Fox

Martha Lane Fox is the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Champion and has been tasked with getting as many of the 17 million people who are not online to use the internet by the time of the Olympics in 2012.  She is especially interested on focusing on the 6 million who cannot afford internet access.
She hopes to achieve this [...]

Ofcom – Annual Communications Market Review 2008

Ofcom’s fourth annual review on Northern Ireland’s communications market was released last week.
Introduction: Communications Market Report: Northern Ireland
Report: The Communications Market 2009: Nations & Regions – Northern Ireland (pdf)
Here are some highlights from the report:
“A third of households in Northern Ireland have watched TV or video online…”
This includes catchup TV services such as BBC iPlayer [...]

Digital Life Skills

The Digital Britain report took into account another review published at the same time by Baroness Estelle Morris,  entitled ‘Independent Review of ICT User Skills‘, which proposes an ‘entitlement’ to digital life skills and calls for basic computing skills training (in England) as well as a focused strategy to address the gaps.
The term ‘Digital Life Skills’ is [...]

The Groundswell enabled by Social Media and Web 2.0

I stumbled upon a blog post today by Gareth Murran of ThirdForce titled: Groundswell in an e-learning 2.0 world.
In his post Gareth is referring to a book he has just finished reading:
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Hardcover) by Charlene Li (Author), Josh Bernoff (Author)
The book focuses on how people are using [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet

myguide is a website that offers an easy and clear introduction to the internet for absolute beginners.
It provides free email, internet search and basic IT courses.  It is also possible to personalise your experience by saving settings such as colour scheme, text size and screen resolution – a very useful feature.
The ‘Welcome courses’ require no registration and [...]

GMTV and NIACE helping people over 50 get online

“One in three people over 50 don’t use the internet, putting them at greater risk of social, financial and political exclusion”
NIACE and GMTV have partnered to encourage those over 50 to improve their computer skills and access the internet.  In an article by NIACE titled Help people over 50 get online, Dr. Hilary Jones shares [...]

Media Literacy for the 21st Century

Ofcom and University of Ulster conference on Media Literacy

Us Now Film

Us Now is a documentary film which shows how online networks, created by new technologies (Web 2.0), are empowering communities.  This includes for example, football fans running their own club and people taking greater involvement in the democrate process.
George Osborne, MP is quoted on the site as saying:
“Everyone with their PC can upload a video [...]