 We're going to start in a couple of minutes. But we're going to need two volunteers. There's not only four of us on the stage, but we need another two. We'd like to bring you all if possible. But we need two participants who, because there's a pretty digitally literate audience and their focus is around digital literacy, we'd like two people that think they're pretty cool with word because we'd like to put you to a test while we're talking. Now, this is fantastic. It's not called the iPad mini chocolate fish competition for nothing. So we just need two people that are happy to come and you'll have 15 minutes to do an online test while we're talking, because it helps to illustrate what we're talking about. There we are. If there's no volunteers, Leith has been delegated to identify people. Who hasn't been in like them? For those who've just come in late, would you like an iPad mini? Right, we have one volunteer over there. Wonderful. And we need another one. Yeah, our friend from Australia. Oh, sorry. We've got a volunteer. Wonderful. Cole, we've got our volunteers. All right. Do you need them up on stage? Yes, they need to come up and take your seats ready for you don't know how to start yet. And we'll introduce it in a minute. But you can get comfortable. You have personal assistance here to make sure you're comfortable. Yeah, right. Just before we start, we need another two volunteers to be mic runners, please. There's a microphone on that side there. Could I have a volunteer on that side? Thank you very much. And on this side, someone to be a mic runner. It's not too onerous a task. You do need to have a reasonable level of fitness to run up and down the stairs. No volunteers. OK, I'm going to choose. Choose. Too much democracy around here. Dangerous. OK, folks. Right on 2 o'clock, so we're going to kick off. This is going to be an incredible, interactive, exciting, competitive session. For those of you who came in a little bit late, unfortunately, you will not be able to win the iPad Mini. We already have our competitors up there. But first of all, it's my real pleasure to introduce two wonderful people to you. Lauren Swimfer and Annette Beattie from Hudson City and from 2020 Communications Trust. And they're going to be talking to you about the important role that libraries have to play as digital community hubs over to you. Thanks, Leith. We're going to do a dual act here. So we've got a microphone each. We'll interrupt each other if we get it wrong. We want to do something a bit different in this sort of forum. Well, I appreciate the main focus here. And we've seen so many presentations around digital content, which I guess is really the real focus of the forum. But Annette and I have been addressing one of the other seas, remember the old seas of connectedness, confidence, and content. It was around a few years ago. We're tackling the one of confidence because we're thinking, what's the point of all this wonderful digital content? And it was great to see the previous presentation about how to tackle that, how to bridge the people who are not digitally confident. How do you bring them into this digital world? How are they going to get access to this digital content? So our focus is really around digital literacy and working with communities to bring our digital literacy up. That's why we wanted to check you guys out. So we've got your two nominal representatives up here, Alicia and Tyler, who have volunteered to be your representative to say, well, how digitally literate are you actually, as a community, with sort of basic tools? So they're not allowed to start yet. They've got their hands off the keyboard. But are you ready to go? If we could queue over to the screen, we'll show you. Just go to the screen of what this is what they've got sitting in front of them. They're going to be doing, it's an ICDL diagnostic test in Word. So they'll be working in Word to do a set of tasks. They'll have 15 minutes to do it, and it'll score them at the end. So this is a tool that we use around the country with people interested in increasing their digital literacy. So OK, but when you hear the hooter, now just other people, if you hear hooters going, this is not an evacuation alarm. I wouldn't like everyone to get up and things. But when you hear a hooter, that will be a start button, and it will go again in 15 minutes. Right, that's it. They're under way. So Annette and I will go, and we'll come back to you. If we could queue back to our main presentation. There we are. Good, so we'll get into talking while they're busily working away there. So that's what's underway there. They're doing an ICDL challenge, and we'll find out which is the, who is the digital champion. What we want to talk a little bit about the context for this is around a program called Stepping Up, which we run with libraries around the country. It started in Hutt, that's why Annette's here. It was through Hutt Libraries in 2012. And it was really introduced originally for our computers and homes families who wanted to do more. Once they got a computer, once they got online, how did they develop their skills a bit further? So with a bit of support from Microsoft, we introduced the Stepping Up program back in 2009. It's now been running in a number of libraries around the country. Also it started here, this is one of the early, back in 2012, one of the early courses. It's just really with a tutor. The young guy there is the tutor. And the others around the table are the participants coming in. Since then, a number of other libraries have joined in. Kaitair, Whangarei, Eltham, Palmerston North. Leith's been a great supporter of Palmerston North. Blenheim, Nelson, Tasman Libraries have all been, have introduced the program and are running these sort of Stepping Up courses, modular based courses. This is the sort of thing that's included. These are the modules. This is based on the survey of about a thousand people that have participated across libraries. And it gives you an idea of what they've been most interested in. They get to choose the module that best suits them. It's advertised at a time and it's run as a course in the libraries. Our interest from the 2020 Trust, and why we've been part of this, we were formed here in Wellington. Mayor Wade Brown was our inaugural chair back in 1996 with a view on digital literacy for the Wellington community. Since then, it's expanded nationwide and our focus really hasn't changed. Enabling New Zealanders to fully participate in the digital world as a strapline and that's our focus for it. So, there we are. So, we've got our contestants underway over there. Annie is going to talk a bit about Hutt City involvement. So, we'll just put it over to you there. Hi, everyone. So, Hutt City, we've got a commitment, we've got a population of 100,000 and we've got a pretty serious commitment to making sure that all of our 100,000 residents are digitally literate. In 2012, we decided with Lawrence in 2020 to pilot Stepping Up. And we did that to test demand, but also to see if the logistics were workable for us. So, the pilot turned out to be very successful and it challenged a whole bunch of assumptions that we had about who would be wanting to do computer classes. We don't have dedicated spaces in any of our libraries, but we've got quite a lot of public computers. So, we thought, well, this will be workable. We can do this. We originally got budget for the pilot from the library's OPEX budget, the operating budget, and also from a small amount from the community development team's budget. We chose three of our bigger libraries. So, one was in the CBD and there was two others in suburbs which are quite large. The classes were totally oversubscribed with a waiting list within 48 hours of advertising. All the people that did the course completed an evaluation form after that. And libraries in 2020 and the tutors got together to evaluate the whole thing and do a bit of a debrief to work out what do we do next. Cool. A bit about how did people find out about to go? We weren't sure how to promote this in the community. Originally, our thinking was around families who'd come out of computers and homes around the hut, but we found even though they were very enthusiastic and they said they wanted to do more to come on a particular day at a particular time in the library, didn't fit their schedule. So, that's really why we opened it up and said, well, let's try the whole community. So, this is how it was advertised. We asked people, everybody that participates in it completes a little survey at the end of it on SurveyMonkey. And so, we did ask them about, well, how did you find out about this? And see, interesting, the dominant things here really is the local community newspaper was very influential. It had actually Briar who's helping over here. Our assistants, we put her photo in the paper and everybody signed up. It was a great photo and a great story and people knew about it. But they also came into the libraries. I think the people we were targeting often didn't have the confidence to go. They could have registered online, but most people didn't. They would prefer to go to the librarian and say, look, I've seen about this thing, how do I get involved really? And so, that's how they did it. And we also asked them, well, why did they participate? Why, what were they trying to get out of this? And see again that the dominant response was really just general upskilling. I just want to know more about this. I know this stuff's important. I just need to have more confidence in using computers and using the internet. But closely followed by people trying to sort of improve aspect of their lives around managing finances, shopping online. People were trying to use the digital technologies to do something a bit different. But you see from that list up there, people were there for a whole lot of reasons. And I think part of the way the program was constructed, it was not just you've got to go and do a 13-week computer studies course at the tertiary institution if you want to know about this stuff. You can pop in a couple of hours. You can walk out of here knowing a bit more than when you went in feeling a little bit more confident about computers. And what actually turned out, what do people actually value about the program? And so there's probably a bit of much data to absorb it once. But if you look at the blue and the red bits, so the blue are people saying this was extremely important. And the red is saying this was very important. So, well, if you even add the greens in, you get the important. But if you look at the blues and the reds, you get a sense of these were the elements of the program that people felt was the most benefit. And if your eye can scroll across, you'll find that the one they thought was most important, here's a bit of a clue, was the friendly instructor. So this was one of our instructors in Stokes Valley, I think, was she in Stokes Valley, Brian? And why do we? Yeah, yeah. So having a friendly instructor who would be part of the program and that was sort of a big factor. Right. Back to you. Thank you. So for us, the pilot showed that there was a really strong demand for digital literacy classes. And for us now in Hutt, stepping up courses have been core business all through 2013 onwards. It showed us that there was a real need for a basic, basic class. So these guys had to create a whole new module. We realised that people that were coming in to do what we thought were basic IT courses, they needed something even more basic than that. We found there was a split between those who were out of work or on the benefit and those who were retired. The splits are roughly 50-50%. So for us, that really challenged our assumptions about who the audience might be. We found the majority of attendees had broadband and had a PC at home. But oftentimes, they didn't know how to use either and they couldn't often get onto either. For Hutt, stepping up being business as usual, we now run five classes for three terms of every year. We have three libraries that operate the classes on PCs and two libraries that use laptops. The two libraries using the laptops are our smaller sites. So by smaller, I mean probably about half the size of the stage, but we still have about eight to 12 people during those courses each time. We're constantly oversubscribed. And because sometimes there's no shows, it's a bit not so good, but we find that the no shows are often because the classes are free, so there's no skin in the game, because the weather or because transport options aren't so brilliant. In the last couple of years, we've had about 2,000 people have completed the courses of Stepping Up. In terms of ages, about 75% are over the age of 50, about 65% are female and 57% are Pakiha. For us, Stepping Up is funded out of our library's OPEX now, and it's considered our base IT starting course. Cool. So we're going to come to the Digital Champion in a minute. They haven't had their 15 minutes yet, so we'll give them just another couple of minutes. We're at links to what we're doing. This is a free program, say, broadly at the community. It's not a qualifications-based program. Stepping Up is just something for life skills. And with those stats, it sort of threw some surprises to us and I think Annette as well, about the profile of the people that were coming. It didn't quite reach exactly the people we were after. We were looking for the people from the lower-income communities, lower-decel communities, people without access to computers and internet in their home. And half of them fit that, but half of them weren't. They were people that had access to technology but just didn't have the skills to sort of use it. So what we have as a follow-up to that and what these people are working on is something that starts to move into the qualifications and do online testing, online training, online testing. And this is where we're starting to work with libraries around the country, with Chambers of Commerce, with PTE, others in the sector to say, well, what do people want to do more than that? What you can learn in two hours is interesting, but how do you go on a journey to turn it into something that's going to be useful for employment, useful for work, and how can you demonstrate to a potential employer that you've actually got a set of basic digital literacy skills? So that's the ICDL program that we're using for that. We have a community lottery grant to actually support job seekers with exactly what's going on over here at the moment. Go online, learn about the program, and of course the problem is they say, well, I haven't got a computer, I haven't got the internet. What do you do about that? Go to the libraries, the number of computers that are in libraries around the country. It's not gonna work everywhere because some of the libraries are visited. There's queues of people sitting waiting to actually get live, especially in South Auckland. So the issue of taking some of those computers out. But I think it's still missing the key point of people that actually how are they gonna get the basic skills, the people that are coming into libraries and using the free wifi, using the library computers. I've already digitally literate enough to actually know to do that. The Stepping Up program has brought, I think, another group in that's now built their confidence to come in if they don't have access in their homes. But there's still another big group, I think, that we have to yet reach out to, particularly getting into jobs. But so much of this stuff is also just about living. So, are we just about ready for our digital champion? We may actually, we could give them, I think on my time clock, how are they doing on the time clock over there? They've still got five minutes. So we could take a couple of questions, Leith. Leith, we could, well, we'll let them go for another five minutes. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The preference on the stand, what they just take. Any magic answers for the no show thing, because we have the same thing in Auckland libraries. Free courses, yeah, no shows. If people don't show up, we try and ring the next people on the waiting list and see if they can get into the course. That's work sometimes, not always. And sometimes you've just got a gap in your course. We're not talking big numbers, though. So I think out of, for example, I think it was 2013, we had 1,000 enrollments. I think about 850 to 900 people actually turned up. So 10% no show. And not all just because it was free and they couldn't be bothered. It was, you know, legitimate things. It's life, yeah. I think one of the cool things that the library's introduced out there was that it looked like the dentist's card because people had come into a library and say, oh, I'll go to them all. Sign me all up for the next 10 weeks. But then they'd forget. They get a reminder sent to them by email, but we're not talking about people that are looking at their email first thing every morning. And the facility wasn't there to send them a text. So the library staff innovated with just a like, well, the old dentist still do it. I think they do. You had an appointment card. They'd fill in all the ones and the dates and times that people had enrolled for. And interesting because I was in prep for this reading through the evaluation and the debrief notes for the 2012 pilot. And one of the comments from some of the people that had come to those pilot classes was they didn't want as many reminders as they were getting from the libraries on the lead up to. So we now do, I think it's three days before, get hold of them and say, remember you've got this happening in a couple of days time. So make sure you show up. So it's just honing it. Actually, John, could you switch over to the other screen so we can just have a bit of an idea how our contestants are going. And just so you can sort of see how they're going as well through their tests. It is a bit random. You don't know who's who here. Philip. No, don't look at you guys. Just carry on. Face the front. Hi, I'm Philip Poncello from Waitaki. About four weeks ago, I went to Literacy Aotearoa and their focus is obviously basic literacy and numeracy, but they are experiencing like libraries all over the country, also a lot of people streaming in and needing the digital side, which in another hat that I'm wearing is I am on the local Literacy Aotearoa board. And we are now actively working with our local Popo in North Otago. And so just a question. There is a huge potential here for collaboration because we are basically attempting to do exactly the same, have the same focus. Any comments? Yeah. Look, we've chatted with Literacy Aotearoa. A lot of the issues around funding and I think they've come from a different base, not from a computer literacy or digital literacy base, but I know the conversations we've had very interested in actually seeing that as part of what they do. So we work with individual members from Literacy Aotearoa around the country who do provide or do have facilities. So a bit of it's about having access to facilities, computers connected to the internet, Wi-Fi space and if you're in the PTE sector, people are in there for someone's got to pay for all that really. And the beauty of course of access in the library space is it's already there and our mission is to get council sort of like Cut City and like there's other ones I mentioned, are getting in behind it and making it happen. So look, there is a dialogue and it is there and we'll work with anybody that sort of shares that vision of how do we create a more digitally literate New Zealand. First question here. Because I think how much time do you need for the wrap-up? I think I've had there 15 minutes. I think I've had there 15 minutes. We'll let them do their wrap-up. So we can have the other question while they're doing their wrap-up. OK, I noticed actually with the previous question when the word collaboration was used, Tyler leaned over to look at what Ellie was doing. And it's related to my question, which is, do you think how important is it to have the face-to-face meeting together to do this scaling up and how much of it could be some of it online? And you've mentioned already that some people didn't even feel confident to go online and register. Do you think there's an opportunity to use it in combination with online and meeting in the library? Oh, yeah. Do you want to come? Are you talking about for people or for libraries in 2020? Debrief or are you talking about? No, I'm talking about people actually scaling up in this way. How important is it for them to actually come to the library to do it? Yeah, look, I think from our experience, it really, it was what we call a bit stepping up. It's about the confidence. What we do in our computers and homes program where it starts, it's very much teacher-led people are there to build their confidence. We're trying to expand that, saying, well, instead of just coming to your local school, how about going to your library and there may be different tutors and things there, but still tutor-led. But what you see happening over here with the ICDL, all online courseware, all online diagnostic testing, but we're finding it still works best in a group environment. The old problem is, look, you can do it anytime you like, anywhere you like, any internet connected computer, and people just don't ever quite get around to it. So it's sort of more, what is the glue that keeps people focused and wanting to achieve and wanting to complete, so. All right, there we go. So now, can we have a look? We've got a score up on the board. I can't see this. We've got somebody. Who's one are we looking at? Is this? Seem awesome. Tyler, so Tyler has a score. What's his test result? You can see what he's done there if I can get the glasses on. The overall result, 60%. Generally, in real time, you get 40 minutes to do this test. So we've compressed it into 15. So 60%, it's pretty cool. And it is telling you the different categories of the questions as you scroll down there using the application, document creation, formatting. It's giving you scores. He missed objects all together. Went straight on. 100% in mail mode. Wow. Yeah. OK, so there we go. Can we flick to the other computer and just see how Alicia got on? 50%. Not bad. Not bad, 50%. So what was your top score there? Oh, you got a couple of 75s. Mail merge as well. A very good mail merge thing. So well done. All right, so we didn't do the awards. You're doing that thing. If you don't want it, you can give it away. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, family did our thing. Yeah. Yeah. Do I have to do something? Oh, it's on now. And a question about the budget, you were talking about the pilot, and then it continues to be business as usual. Can you just describe briefly what the budget covers? Like, do you bring in tutors? Like, is it morning and afternoon tea? What does the budget for this actually cover? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know what I said in the bill to Hutt City for. So yeah. Hutt City pays for the tutors. And we pay the tutors, we pay, which means Hutt City pays eventually for three hour session, each two hour session. They pay $35 an hour. So that's, what, $105 per session. That's the main outgoing cost for the tutor. The libraries are providing the space that's there. The internet is there. The computer's there. The computer support is there. The marketing, the promotion has all been provided. So some and other, and it's managed to squeeze all that into their budget. That's just what they do, really. So as well as the training bit. And we've helped where there's been a gap in computers. So we've provided laptop pods for two of the libraries. We've provided these little pull-up banners so people know what's going on. We've provided a couple of data projectors. So where it's one-off stuff like that, it's easy for us. What is hard for us is to pay, week after week, a trainer cost. And that's sort of what we're trying to embed within this is saying, how do you embed this in a library budget where it's just what you do? And, well, Leith's had experience of this in Parmy as well. You may want to comment as well, because it's a slightly different model where they do the whole thing themselves. My only comment, really, is that unfortunately, our time is up. But can we just thank Lawrence and Annette and also our wonderful digital literacy tutors as well and our contestants?