Latest news with #literacy
CTV News
an hour ago
- General
- CTV News
‘A really special day': Winnipeg library celebrates 110th birthday
Winnipeg's St. John's Library celebrated 110 years of helping residents connect with new books. A Winnipeg library that first opened its doors during the First World War is celebrating over a century of literacy, learning and lending in the heart of the North End. St. John's Library hosted a party Monday in honour of its 110th birthday, inviting the public inside for food, activities, and free books—with a valid library card, of course. Attendees could also sign a giant birthday card, decorate a party hat, and take in a photo wall and educational display packed with memories and information about the library's century-plus history. Assistant library branch head Erin Schwartz said schools, families, and even former employees dropped by the party. 'Today is a perfect day to celebrate old and new all coming together,' she told CTV News Winnipeg. While Schwartz has seen a recent uptick in patrons, she hopes the party will attract new visitors to the library—visitors she hopes will return. 'It's really nice to see everyone out here today, and I hope to see some of the new faces come back, the familiar faces, of course, coming back again. It's a really special day.' St. John's Library St. John's Library assistant branch head Erin Schwartz is pictured during a June 2, 2025 interview at the library's 110th birthday party. (Glenn Pismenny/CTV News Winnipeg) The storied history of St. John's Library According to the city, the library at the corner of Machray Avenue and Salter Street was built with a $35,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation to serve the rapidly growing North End. It was designed by architect John N. Semmens based on building requirements of Carnegie-funded libraries. The facility first opened its doors on June 2, 1915, featuring dark oak woodwork, antique reading tables, and two fireplaces—which remain today. The original, one-storey brick building was closed in July 2019 for a renovation and expansion, adding a new accessible entrance, computer area, and leisure spaces. St. John's Library A historical display in St. John's Library is shown on June 2, 2025. (Glenn Pismenny/CTV News Winnipeg) Some of the beloved heritage features, like the librarian's safe for penny fines, remain today, evoking the design of genteel libraries of the early 20th century. The library is also a municipally-designated historic building and received the Manitoba Historical Society's Centennial Organization Award and Heritage Winnipeg's Conservation Award. It turns out St. John's is not the only Winnipeg Public Library celebrating the massive milestone. Cornish Library The Cornish Library's circulation desk is shown in an undated archival photo. (Winnipeg Public Library) The Cornish Library is also set to mark its 110th birthday this year, having first opened its doors on June 15, 1915—days after St. John's welcomed patrons for the first time. Cornish Library was also built with funds from the Carnegie Foundation and has a similar layout and design to St. John's. Similarly, the Armstrong Point facility was designated a heritage building and underwent significant renovations in 2018, reopening four years later with upgrades to the upper and lower levels. There's no word yet on how the Cornish Library will mark its 110th birthday.
The Guardian
15 hours ago
- General
- The Guardian
Indonesia's stunning microlibraries draw young readers
There is an ambitious effort under way in Indonesia to build a network of microlibraries across the country. Pictured: Microlibrary Babakan Sari, also known as Hanging Gardens, in Bandung. Photograph: Muhammad Fadli/The Guardian SHAU architecture firm's Microlibrary Project promotes literacy while offering respite from the heat through a combination of shading and cross-ventilation. Photograph: Dudi Sugandi/SHAU The project was launched in 2012 by SHAU co-founders Daliana Suryawinata and Florian Heinzelmann, who have built eight libraries to have called the libraries 'laboratories for material experimentation', using recycled materials, FSC-certified wood and lightweight concrete in their builds. Photograph: Dudi Sugandi/SHAU The microlibrary Babakan Sari, which was completed in 2019 in Bandung, features a rooftop garden. Photograph: Dudi Sugandi/SHAU The structures are built using a range of materials and passive cooling principles. The facade of the Bima microlibrary in Bandung was built in 2015 with 2,000 discarded ice cream buckets. Photograph: Muhammad Fadli/The Guardian 'The ice cream buckets are very interesting material for translucency in a wall material,' Suryawinata said. The team cut out the bottoms of the buckets, offering natural lighting and Bima microlibrary, in Bandung. Photograph: Sanrok Studio/SHAU 'No matter what material that we use, we want to protecting the people from overheating,' said buckets spell out a hidden message in binary code: books are the windows to the world .Pictured: Bima microlibrary, in Bandung. Photograph: Sanrok Studio/SHAU The libraries partner with local youth organizations to plan activities in recreation Bima microlibrary, in Bandung. Photograph: Muhammad Fadli/The Guardian Nearby schools send classes to the Bima microlibrary during the week. Photograph: Muhammad Fadli/The Guardian The Warak Kayu microlibrary was built in 2020 in Semarang, in Central Java. The designers have said the 'micro' concept was intentional, making the spaces more approachable for local residents. Photograph: KIE/SHAU Placing the Warak Kayu microlibrary on stilts left room for a swing and open recreation area. Photograph: KIE/SHAU In 2024, Heinzelmann and Suryawinata created a foundation to support the microlibrary project's growth. The goal? Expand to 100 branches by 2045. Photograph: SHAU
Forbes
18 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
3 Strategies For Building An AI-Literate Organization
Findings from recent SAP research indicates those with higher literacy were far more likely to expect positive outcomes from AI, and far less likely to feel fear, distress, or apprehension. By Dr. Autumn D. Krauss, Chief Scientist, Market Insights & Customer Engagement, SAP SuccessFactors The rapidly advancing nature of artificial intelligence presents a challenge for organizations and their workforces that want to embrace it. Everyone knows they need to adopt AI, but with AI-enabled tools and technology changing on a daily basis, it's hard to figure out how to jump in and start making sense of it all. This prompts the primary question of who is more likely to catch the AI wave by successfully building the right type of AI knowledge and skills and how they can best go about gaining them. To investigate this topic, my team of organizational scientists at SAP first conducted a global study in October 2024 to understand the AI attitudes and behaviors of workers across industries, gathering responses from 4,023 employees and managers. The questions were broad: Had respondents used AI tools at work? How optimistic—or anxious—did they feel about AI's growing role in the workplace? Were they confident in their own ability to work with these tools? Findings from that study showed that the biggest factor shaping how employees felt about AI at the time—whether they were hopeful, fearful, or somewhere in between—was their level of AI literacy. Did they know how to apply AI to achieve goals? Could they detect when they were interacting with AI? Could they assess the capabilities and limitations of the technology? These are the qualities of AI literacy. Those with higher literacy were far more likely to expect positive outcomes from AI, and far less likely to feel fear, distress, or apprehension. They were also more likely to express nuanced, mature views on how AI use should (or shouldn't) influence workplace decisions like promotion and compensation. It was too early to draw a straight line from an employee's AI literacy to business performance, but it made sense that workers most comfortable experimenting with new tools and spotting their practical value would also be the ones to help drive meaningful returns. How do you build that kind of AI-literate workforce? Our recent follow-up study of 4,030 employees and managers globally makes clear that even though different people require different kinds of support, three core strategies yield the strongest effect: experiential exposure, structured training, and the influence of an AI-literate organizational culture. More on each approach follows. The most effective way to build AI literacy is to let people get their hands dirty. For many, comfort with AI is like comfort behind the wheel when you're learning to drive. Manuals and even simulators are simply not a substitute. For organizations, this means giving employees low-stakes ways to experiment with AI. Let them use it to draft e-mails, summarize documents, or mockup project plans. The key is to keep the setting contained—such as internal communications or intramural projects—where mistakes are low-impact, quickly forgiven, and unlikely to reach customers or damage the company's reputation. While best practices are emerging, it is clear that AI training works best when it's specific to the tools people use, the jobs they hold, and the tasks they perform. Many employees don't realize that AI is already embedded in their applications—suggesting Outlook replies or auto-summarizing meetings in Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Helping them spot those features—while showing how much faster a task gets done with AI versus without—can build confidence. At the job-level, a good AI training program lifts workers' performance. For some employees, this may eventually involve learning how models are trained, tuned, and maintained. But for many others, practical essentials will suffice, such as how to craft effective prompts, where to find the right data inputs, and how to integrate AI outputs into their work. A strong training program also should help employees develop a feel for which parts of their work still call for a human touch. When training helps an employee work through these specifics, they can more effectively identify the uses of AI that will most benefit their work. Organizational science has long shown the power of company culture to influence employee attitudes and behaviors. Now there exists an opportunity to use these social dynamics to foster collective AI literacy. Specifically, leaders can and should: When it comes to AI, workers already know it matters and are already thinking seriously about how their jobs will change as a result of it. What they're looking for is help getting started, and AI literacy is the first step. A version of this story appears on
New York Times
20 hours ago
- Business
- New York Times
A.I. Is Coming for the Coders Who Made It
ChatGPT was released two and a half years ago, and we have been in a public panic ever since. Artificial intelligence can write in a way that passes for human, creating a fear that relying too heavily on machine-generated text will diminish our ability to read and write at a high level. We've heard that the college essay is dead, and that alarming number of students use A.I. tools to cheat their way through college. This has the potential to undermine the future of jobs, education and art all at once. The Titanic is indeed headed toward the iceberg, but the largest problem — at least at the moment — is not the college essay, the novel or the office memo. It's computer code. I realized this last year when I was teaching a course on A.I., language and philosophy. When I asked my students how they use chatbots, one told me that whenever he has a spreadsheet full of data (such as results from a lab experiment or information collected from a survey), he was trained in high school to write a quick bit of code to parse and analyze that data. But now, he told me, he just throws the spreadsheet into ChatGPT, which analyzes it more quickly and requires him to do almost nothing. That's when it hit me: A.I. is just as much a challenge to numeracy — our knowledge and ability to use mathematics and reason quantitatively — as it is to literacy. In February, the A.I. engineer Andrej Karpathy reported on X that he was engaged in a new form of software development he called 'vibecoding.' Using nothing more than a series of spoken prompts to a chatbot, he was conducting ad hoc experiments on data and said he would 'barely even touch the keyboard.' He said this allowed him to 'forget that the code even exists,' leaving the grunt work to the A.I. and simply directing from above. Mr. Karpathy's post went viral, and many others acknowledged they were doing the same. By some accounts, though, vibecoding isn't going well. The code that Mr. Karpathy's prompts create has been reported to be inefficient and riddled with irreversible errors. Worse, programmers using the method say they've found themselves not merely forgetting that code exists but forgetting how to code. As is the case with reading and writing a language, code is one of those things where if you don't use it, you lose it. Early studies indicate that humans who use A.I. could become less creative over time. Something not unlike vibecoding has already entered the marketplace. Google claimed in 2024 that A.I. wrote over 25 percent of all of the company's code, and Microsoft recently reported similar numbers as it fired thousands of employees, including many software engineers. Amazon has also adopted streamlined A.I. coding practices, which workers say changes software engineering fundamentally, making a job defined by intellectual effort into something more like industrial drudgery. A.I. companies themselves see the writing on the wall: OpenAI, for example, is in talks to spend a cool $3 billion to acquire Windsurf, a company that offers an A.I.-driven coding assistant. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Herald
21 hours ago
- Business
- The Herald
Improving literacy key to breaking cycle of poverty
A report by the 2030 Reading Panel, chaired by former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, has laid bare the devastating state of literacy in SA. A staggering 80% of grade 3 pupils cannot read for meaning in any language. In the foundational phase of education, when children should be learning the basics of reading and comprehension, SA is failing most of its young learners. At schools like Bongolethu and Glentana Junior Primary, in Nqweba (formerly Kirkwood) the situation is dire. The shortage of classrooms and qualified teachers is so acute that principals have begged for container classrooms just to reduce overcrowding. Teachers manage classes of up to 70 children, making one-on-one instruction impossible. With no libraries, limited books, and little to no security, these schools are trying to operate under conditions that make meaningful learning nearly impossible. The collapse of foundational literacy is a social emergency. Illiteracy affects a child's ability to succeed across all subjects and it affects their ability to participate in society, find employment, and break the cycle of poverty. As noted by education expert Mary Metcalfe, children who cannot read by grade 4 fall further behind each year as the curriculum becomes increasingly reliant on reading skills. Without urgent intervention, these children are being set up for systemic exclusion. The 2024 Reading Panel report makes it clear that SA is producing only half the number of foundation-phase teachers it needs. Early learning programmes reach too few children, with more than a million aged 3 to 5 still not enrolled. And the country spends a mere 0.5% of its budget on ECD, which is far below what is needed to build a literate future. We know what is possible when effort is put into grassroots literacy, as evidenced at schools like Astra Primary. The Gqeberha school launched a literacy initiative centre in 2019 that has reshaped classroom culture and sparked a love of reading. The results are tangible and it has started a movement of sorts that is spreading throughout the community, though space is limited. Over three weeks, The Herald, Daily Dispatch and Sowetan take a deep dive into the state of reading in SA, sharing lessons that would, we hope, spark necessary action and change to improve literacy levels. Our 'Turning the Page' project was made possible by the Henry Nxumalo Foundation. The Herald
