Never too late to learn online, a web-a-morphosis

Several years ago, Dorie Royer's family decided it was finally time she had a computer. She had, after all, just turned 80.

Initially, Royer, who is my aunt, was a bit circumspect. Why did she need this machine now? But at the same time, Tía Dorie, as my family calls her, recognized that she had strong bonds with her grandchildren, some of whom lived far away.

So she began e-mailing them to stay in touch, exchanging photos, sharing news about vacations, school and swimming meets -- the typical stuff of busy American families.

One day, she asked her grandson, John, what he was studying in high school. He said his English class was reading Franz Kafka's short story, "Metamorphosis."

She downloaded the story from the Internet and read it. Next, she took on Kafka's "The Trial." The stories were a little strange, she said, but she enjoyed the writing -- and it gave her a good conversation topic to share with her grandson.

"Too many people say [to their grandchildren], 'How was your day?' And they say, 'Fine.' And that's it," she told me last week. "But when you take the time to learn what they're learning, they think, 'Grandma really cares about what I'm studying.' "

So began Tía Dorie's web-a-morphosis. The World Wide Web has enabled her to not only share the "triumphs and challenges" facing her grandchildren, she says, but to "encourage them on to greater things."

Such inside-the-box thinking also has taken Tía on to greater things, as she's learned about the theories of condensed matter posited by English mathematical physicist Roger Penrose; read verse by renowned American poet Elizabeth Bishop; learned about the biology of marine life like jellyfish; and watched the Cassini-Huygens space probe as it entered into orbit around Saturn and descend on Saturn's moon, Titan.

Her journey has convinced me that it's time, once and for all, to throw out the stereotypes of seniors being too old to learn new technologies.

Sure, it may be a bit harder getting computers to click for mature minds. And like all Internet users, seniors have to watch out for viruses, identity theft and websites that are not reliable or credible. But the opportunity to learn about almost anything online -- for free -- provides an astounding resource for an aging population that faces the challenges of isolation, limited mobility and tight budgets. "It has made all the difference in the world," Tía Dorie says.

I've been particularly intrigued by the exploding number of free college courses online, known collectively as the "open educational resources" movement. You can get a broad sampling of these offerings at OpenCulture.com, a website that lists more than 250 free audio and video courses in the liberal arts, from archaeology to urban studies, at universities worldwide.

Or check out the hundreds of thousands of scholarly lectures on "smorgasbord sites" such as Academic Earth (Academicearth.org), iTunes U and YouTube, or stand-alone university sites, such as MIT, Yale and University of California- Berkeley.

Recently, I decided to take a tour of Open Yale Courses and have started listening to the lectures on literary theory by English professor Paul Fry, who was teaching at the university when I was an undergraduate, but whose classes I missed. (Thankfully, I can pause the video when necessary and, oh yeah, I don't have to write the papers or try to impress graduate student teaching assistants.)

Sometimes, however, the learning comes from websites where users do interact with each other, as well as a roster of experts. Recently, a friend told me about a site called Daily Strength

(dailystrength.org), which he discovered after his doctor diagnosed him with a rare autoimmune disorder called Myasthenia gravis, that caused one of his eyelids to droop as well as occasional double vision.

Although the website has a section where users can ask doctors and other experts specific questions, the main mission is to offer hundreds of online support groups where people can exchange information about their medical conditions or "life challenges," like empty nest syndrome.

My friend was not looking for a medical opinion, but wanted to know which therapies people found most effective -- and without this group, it would have been hard to find such information, since fewer than 20 in 100,000 people suffer from the disorder.

These days, Tía Dorie continues to correspond with her grandchildren, sometimes forwarding interesting topics she reads on Scientific American online. Now almost 89, she's on the computer most days, also working on her memoir. Her daughter, Chris, sometimes chastises her: "C'mon Mom, you've been on the computer all day."

She's learned how to put things into different computer files, and from her book club readings she's noticed "how important it is to describe things and choose vivid words," she said. "It's a learning process, expressing yourself."

Indeed, a lifelong metamorphosis.