Making Digital Literacy Interesting

I came into a class called Design Your Impact thinking that I would be doing something for refugees or migrant workers because I have been involved with those groups at my previous school. In the discussions at the beginning of the course where we explored a variety of issues, I realized that I should not limit myself to what I came into this class with. Particularly, the issues that we face daily yet are hard to recognize as issues interested me. During the brainstorming and research phase, I started thinking about my experience and the South Korean variety shows and lookism in Korea came to mind. I grew up watching South Korean variety shows, and recently, I’ve been noticing captions heavily focused on appearance such as one remarking how a man looks like a rotten zucchini. Based on such observations, I started to think that captions may contribute to South Korean society’s obsession with appearance. I went further to research lookism and variety shows in South Korea by investigating how the presence of positive and negative captions affects individuals’ tendencies to focus on appearance via statistical experimentation and analysis. In this research study, I found out that negative, criticizing captions do indeed cause individuals to focus on the body feature that was commented on more than positive captions and having no captions do. Finding evidence that media consumption can affect us in ways we don’t realize inspired me to expand my vantage point to digital literacy in general. Realizing that there is no official curriculum for digital literacy at my school, I reached out to the ed-tech department. It turns out that the teachers were already building a curriculum, so I joined as a student contributor. Ultimately, I created 6 lessons targeted to HS seniors, one for each of 6 themes: privacy/security, relationships and communication, digital footprint/image/identity, information literacy, creative credit/copyright, and cyberbullying/digital drama. When creating these lessons, I chose non-cliche topics that are useful for seniors who are going off to college soon (ex. Current scamming strategies, danger of communicating when one is emotional, etc.). I also stayed away from “discussion” activities that will only bore students and incorporated intriguing hooks (ex. find how much Google has been tracking your location, SNL videos as an example of parody, etc.) to ensure that the lessons keep the students engaged. These lessons will become a guideline/starting point for the Korea International School digital literacy curriculum that will be implemented in a few years. In the end, the experience taught me how to apply my knowledge and experience as a current senior to a long-term and sustainable project. A piece of advice that I want to give someone who wants to start a similar project is to just begin. You may be discouraged because you think someone else is already what you envision doing or because you are not sure if you can pull through with the project. However, it is important to realize that starting is all it takes. Just start, and the rest will follow, whether you believe it or not.