This page contains links to evaluations, testimonials and reflections about our work. It’s useful and important for us to learn as we go along and remember what we have done, what worked and what did not. It also provides a handy timeline of our development.
We provide links to online evaluation resources from other organisations we have worked / collaborated with and where possible also the downloadable files from our website, because web links can fade over time as organisations change their websites, can we collect copies of this this information locally to act as part of our ‘own organisational memory’.
Contents
2018 Digital Skills Academy Dublin: Early Prototype Exercise
2019 – 2021 UFI VocTech Trust: Development of an App Prototype
2020 NESTA in Scotland: Using AI to Improve Voice Recognition for Regional Accents
2020-2021 NESTA UK Career Tech Challenge: Further development of the App and Business Planning.
2018 Digital Skills Academy Dublin: Early Prototype Exercise
We worked with students from the Digital Skills Academy on early visualisation prototypes, this was extremely useful to us and marked the start of our collaborations as a team and also with the Claire Colllins Consultancy. The project also produced our logo. Student credits are available on our Acknowledgements page.
2019 – 2021 UFI VocTech Trust: Development of an App Prototype
This small project enabled us to develop our ideas further with the creation of a ‘web app’ (a website that works like a native app) and 2 native apps (iOS and Android). This was when we really starting to get going and was a great step forwards. Here is a summary of the evaluation report
- Key findings from the evaluation include:
Opportunity to engage in low-stakes, bite-sized literacy learning is appreciated by beginner literacy learners. - Flexible opportunities for adults to continuously practise and develop their literacy skills are particularly welcomed by learners, and teachers are able to utilise learners’ enthusiasm for the app to devise and in some instances, co-create blended learning opportunities.
- Literacy difficulties restrict learners’ everyday activities, movements and routines (using the app helped to reduce these restrictions)
There is an immediate and urgent need for age-appropriate adult literacy resources, a need that the app helps to meet. - The critical role of learning advocates in engagement and support for literacy learning (including trusted friends/ family members, teachers, community support workers, union project workers and others).
- We have seen that use of the app is mediated in most cases by such advocates and we also note that our evaluation process was shaped by the knowledge that beginner literacy learners cannot read significant amounts of text, and so needed to be reached through verbal means, mediated in many cases by advocates.
- How use of the app has helped to strengthen literacy learning relationships.
The importance of acknowledging beginner adult literacy learners’ needs when undertaking an evaluation, in so far as text-based questionnaires are not appropriate. - Advocates have a key role to play in brokering spoken interviews [HK4] (both to complete questionnaires and to undertake deeper, open questioning) and, also, sharing adult literacy learners’ experiences.
Full detailed evaluation report (54 pages)
Diane’s Refections on creating the early app 2021 (pdf)
2020 NESTA in Scotland: Using AI to Improve Voice Recognition for Regional Accents
A short project exploring how to improve common voice recognition tools to cope with regional accents, using machine learning to ‘tune’ the system to an individual users voice. The particular project was targeting a common problem in these systems where speaking a single word in an accent can return wrong results.
“Using artificial intelligence (AI), Citizen Literacy found a way of overcoming this problem by using the free open source AI software TensorFlow, the team were able to build machine mearning into the app, with the ability to have it trained by the user to recognise their accent for selected words.” Full article (pdf)
In time we will use this work in our future developments.
2020-2021 NESTA UK Career Tech Challenge: Further development of the App and Business Planning.
This programme was quite tech-centric and was focussed on “stimulating new solutions for precarious workers, such as workers in low paid, insecure work, susceptible to change, to upskill and retrain online, or access accurate data-driven information, advice and guidance that helps them find work. “
We proposed that because over 15% of the workforce has low literacy then it would be good to give them access to an extended version of the app to provide a learning pathway. We were succesful in getting funding and the support and interest we got from NESTA was great, with access to business planning and service design. Our project manager at NESTA, Liz North, was very supportive. When Liz presented our work to the The UK All Party Parliamentary Group for education one of the responses was ‘Why has no one done this before?”.
This project really helped us to push thing on further, we also worked through the COVID pandemic against considerable obstructions. The project made us think about concentrating on a web only version and ditch the native apps.
Here is an overview of the project on NESTA website also available as a PDF.
Here is a link to the online summary NESTA Evaluation Report for Citizen Literacy Literacy. The full report (worth a read!) is available as a PDF.
This is an extract:
“Evaluation findings and lessons learned
The evaluation identified a range of positive outcomes for learners, who reported that a phonics-based solution that is adult-centric increased their engagement with the tool and motivation to learn. Engagement with the app also supported learners to widen their physical movements and interactions. Learners who previously felt their daily lives and activities were restricted by their literacy skills reported catching the bus, going into a shop and engaging in text-based tasks at work.”
We also have another internal evaluation report that the Claire Colllins Consultancy did for us that details the research methods that were used and draw conclusions for further work – extremely useful its available as a 38 Page PDF.
2022 – 2023 Literacy 100: Working with the Literacy 100 Charity to Improve Literacy Support for homeless People.
This charity convened working groups to create a ‘Charter’ of best practice to pressure policy makers to improve things. We contributed to the work of the Literacy Education and Technology Groups. The Charter is going to be launched in September 2023.