The seminar will be conducted by Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Tartu, Kadri Leetmaa, and Lecturer in Cognitive and School Psychology, Triin Liin.

Digital transformation has fundamentally changed the way how society functions. Digital life is no longer just a means of communication, but instead, ‘digital’ has become ‘natural’, making hard to distinguish digital transactions from our general presence in the society. What has received relatively little attention, is who remains excluded from this transformative change. To compensate the gap digital transformation should be examined more from the perspective of the ‘margins’ of the society, through the places and people that are usually not at the centre of defining the smartification trends.

In the ongoing research project, we focus on rural areas and older people—we explore how elderly people in peripheral rural areas adapt to the increasingly digitalized life.

In the EstWell seminar we present our first methodological reflections from the ongoing learning experiment (Sept-Dec 2024, follow-up focus groups planned in Jan/Feb 2025) with rural elderly in four Estonian municipalities. We formed small local community study groups, where prepared digital learning took place on tablets in the experiment and control group setting, coordinated by local community researchers. In the seminar we mainly reflect the methodological aspects of the learning experiment.