International Literacy Day
Written By Ned Zimmerman-Bence, Co-Founder of GogyUpWe're celebrating International Literacy Day and applauding its theme - Literacy for a human-centered recovery: Narrowing the digital divide - by running a contest for the rest of September to help Adult Education and Adult Literacy programs while also narrowing that digital divide.
One Adult Education organization will win a cash prize of $500 and one individual will win a $25 Amazon gift card.
How?
The contest involves generating the dataset needed to train our latest project, Smart Dictionary - i.e., a dictionary that will serve up the appropriate definition for a word’s context when that word is selected in GogyUp’s apps. All participants need to do is select the best definition for a word in a given passage.
The contest begins on September 8th to celebrate International Literacy Day and will run through September 30th.
Adult Education programs can email contest@gogyup.com to be added to the contest.
We encourage any adult - adult learner, educator, or word lover to join in!
Individuals can register, choose their program affiliation, and begin the contest at http://www.gogyup.com/trainer.
A leaderboard just for Adult Education programs will be shared every Friday during the contest on LinkedIn, Twitter (@GogyUp), Instagram (@Gogy.Up), and Facebook, with the final winner announced on October 1st.
The program with the highest participation will receive $500 and the individual with the highest participation will receive a $25 Amazon gift card.
Download a detailed direction sheet here.
$500 Prize = $30,000 Impact
In the United States, Adult Education programs are historically underfunded. 73% of programs have annual revenue of $200,000 or less, rely on a majority of part-time or volunteer staff, and receive a fraction of the per-learner funding the K12 system receives. Nearly 1/2 of the Adult U.S. Population (102,579,805) is not considered proficient at reading, yet "only 10% of adults have access to the instruction they need" and 50% of programs have student waiting lists, according to the advocacy group ProLiteracy.
On a global scale, at least 773 million youth and adults are in need of literacy instruction. The COVID-19 crisis has raised a magnifying glass to this vast need - especially in light of misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 causes, prevention, and treatment.
While $500 won't solve the immense problem by any means it will certainly give a boost to a single program. In fact the Coalition on Adult Basic Education (COABE) estimates that every dollar invested in Adult Education generates $60 of economic impact!
Why a Smart Dictionary
Dictionaries, digital or hard copy, are phenomenal tools for learning. Yet when one "needs to know now", standard dictionaries are not as helpful as they could be to help an adult quickly understand a work instruction, medical term, or other critical piece of information in-the-moment. This is especially true for print English where many words may have multiple meanings.
GogyUp is developing a Smart Dictionary tool for digital texts that will parse each word in a sentence and provide the precise definition for a selected word, based on how the word is used in a sentence. The training participants will do during September will provide our algorithms with a substantial dataset to begin to meet this objective.
How does GogyUp benefit Adult Education programs?
GogyUp develops assistive-reading technology that Adult Education programs can easily implement and access for free. Our mission is to empower every adult to understand what they need to know now and, over time, become literate to advance in a dynamic world. We offer our easy-to-implement, assistive-reading technology to Adult Education and Adult Literacy programs at no cost to enable these vital and severely under-resourced services to expand into distance learning in tandem with their existing instruction.