ONGOING RESEARCH
Tinkering, Teaching, and Taking Responsibility
How older adults are collectively learning, questioning and shaping AI
Explores how older adults learn about generative AI together through experimentation, peer learning and collective problem-solving, challenging assumptions that later-life AI education is simply about catching up on digital skills.
Research lead:
Michael Doneman
Research Lead:
Key takeaway
Older adults can be experimenters, critics, mentors and co-designers of emerging technology.
AI capability can be built collectively through tinkering, peer learning and shared problem-solving.
Digital inclusion policy may need to consider what communities can learn and sustain together, not only individual digital skills.
Impact in practice
The project could reshape approaches to later-life AI education and digital inclusion by informing community-based learning models that emphasise experimentation, critical judgement, peer learning and responsible AI use.
About the research
This research explores what happens when older adults engage with AI together and challenges the idea that older adults are technological latecomers who simply need to acquire new digital skills. Instead, participants emerge as experimenters, informed critics, mentors, co-designers and civic actors who bring extensive histories of work, learning, care and technological change to their encounters with AI.
At the heart of the project is a different way of thinking about digital agency in later life: agency is not simply something an individual possesses, but something people can build and sustain together.
Working with University of the Third Age (U3A) participants, the project follows a community experimenting with generative AI through collective tinkering: trying tools, comparing results, troubleshooting problems, questioning assumptions, refusing poor outputs, teaching one another and creating things together. This has led to the creation of a U3AI Tinker Lab an ongoing COmmunity of Practice, participant-led courses and resources for the U3A community.
Why it matters
Much discussion about older adults and emerging technologies begins with what people supposedly lack: digital skills, confidence, knowledge or technological experience.
This project starts somewhere different.
Older adults have already lived through decades of social and technological change. When they encounter AI, they draw on accumulated knowledge, professional experience, relationships, values and previous experiences of adapting to new technologies.
Generative AI also presents a particular challenge because the technology itself keeps changing. Knowing how to use one tool today does not necessarily prepare someone for what that tool, or the wider AI environment, will become tomorrow.
The research therefore reframes digital capability as the capacity to “stay in play”: to continue experimenting, participating, questioning, comparing, recovering from breakdowns and making judgements as technologies change.
This also makes AI ethics an everyday concern. Ethical positions emerge not as a fixed, predetermined quantitites but as elements of a process. Participants do not simply receive ethical principles from experts. They encounter questions about accuracy, responsibility, privacy, representation and appropriate use while working with AI and must decide collectively what responsible engagement looks like in practice.
Research focus
The project is guided by the broad question "How do older adults engage and empower a Community of Practice mobilising with AI?"
Importantly, the research has also questioned its own starting assumptions, including whether engagement is necessarily empowering and whether a community can simply be created through research design.
The project explores:
Collective tinkering: how people learn through experimenting, troubleshooting, comparing, adapting, making and trying again.
Agency in later life: how participation, questioning, hesitation and even refusal can be expressions of agency.
Learning together: how participants teach, mentor and support one another rather than relying only on formal instruction.
Communities of Practice: how shared practices can develop around a technology that is itself continually changing.
Practical AI ethics: how people make judgements about appropriate, responsible and trustworthy uses of AI through experience.
Older adults as contributors: how older people become critics, mentors, creators and co-designers rather than passive recipients of the impact of technological change.
Staying in play: how people sustain the capacity to participate when neither the technology nor the answers remain stable.
How the research is being conducted
The research uses Participatory Action Research (PAR) and has developed through four iterative cycles of activity, reflection and revision with older U3A participants between 2024 and 2026.
Participants work as co-inquirers rather than research subjects, with the researcher participating as a peer within an emerging community of practice.
Much of the research takes place online through workshops, webinars, interviews, discussion forums and collaborative experimentation. Participants explore AI through co-design, experimentation, troubleshooting, peer mentoring and collective reflection.
The process has generated a rich range of materials, including prompts, participant artefacts, creative works, avatar experiments, courses, governance documents, concept papers, fieldwork records and discussions about the ethical implications of AI.
The research method itself also involves tinkering. Rather than imposing a fixed research design on a rapidly changing technology and community, the project has been continuously adjusted as the technologies, participants' interests and research questions have evolved.
Meet the Researcher
Michael Doneman
Michael is the founding director of Edgeware Creative Entrepreneurship, a small-business training and coaching company, and maintains his own coaching practice. His long standing experience across education, creative practice and community development informs the participatory orientation of his doctoral research and his interest in how people learn and create knowledge together.
Who the research is for
The project works with older adult learners from the U3A community, who participate not simply as people learning about AI but as collaborators experimenting with what meaningful and responsible engagement with AI might look like.
Potential impact
Tinkering, Teaching, and Taking Responsibility aims to change how later-life engagement with AI is understood, taught and supported.
For older adult learning communities, the research is developing practical approaches to AI learning, including the U3AI Tinker Lab proposal, participant-led courses and resources for the U3A community. Rather than organising AI education primarily around individual skills instruction, these approaches emphasise sustained experimentation, peer learning and collective problem-solving.
For research, the project challenges deficit accounts of ageing and technology by demonstrating forms of competence that include experimentation, critical judgement, mentoring, hesitation and refusal. It also explores how communities of practice operate when the technology around which the community has formed continually changes.
For policy and digital inclusion, the project suggests that we may need to look beyond measuring what individuals can do independently and pay greater attention to what communities are able to build, learn and sustain together.
Ultimately, the project proposes a different vision of ageing and AI: older adults not as people struggling to catch up with technological change, but as active participants in determining how emerging technologies should be learned, questioned, adapted and used responsibly.