Digital Literacy

Questions and model answers

1. When you come across a new app or tool, how do you work out how to use it?

   I press things until something breaks, more or less. That sounds reckless and mostly isn't, because almost nothing in software is actually irreversible. Not documentation first — I'll open it and try to do the one thing I actually came for, and usually get about seventy percent of the way there. That last thirty percent is when I search, and by then I know what to search for, which is the part people skip. A vague search returns a hundred pages and none of them are about your problem. The one thing I've learned to do first is find where undo is. Once I know I can't permanently ruin anything, I'll click on everything, and that's much faster than reading about it.

2. Do you trust information more when it comes from a person you know or from a search?

   A person, but only for certain things — and I've noticed I'm not consistent about it. For anything factual, a search wins easily. My friend's memory of a date is worse than the first result, and we both know it. But for anything that involves judgment — is this course worth taking, is this doctor good — I'd take one person who's been through it over fifty reviews. Fifty strangers agreeing tells me less than one person I can interrupt. The reason, I think, is the follow-up question. A review can't tell me whether the thing it liked is the thing I'd care about. The risk is obvious: one person is one sample, and I know that and do it anyway.

3. Tell me about a time you were misled by something you read online.

   I spent about forty dollars on a language app because of an article comparing five of them. It read like a genuine review — pros and cons, a bit of criticism, a clear winner. I read the whole thing and felt informed. Two months later I found the same article, almost word for word, on three other sites, all recommending the same app. It was marketing wearing the clothes of a comparison. What actually caught me wasn't the praise, it was the criticism: it named small flaws, and that made the whole thing feel honest. Now the thing I check first is whether the negative points are ones that would actually stop me buying. If the flaws are all cosmetic, someone chose them.

4. Do you think schools should teach students how to judge online information?

   Yes, but not as a subject, because the moment it becomes a subject it becomes a checklist — check the author, check the date — and nobody applies a checklist to something they already want to believe. That's the actual failure. People aren't fooled by things they're neutral about. You check a claim you dislike automatically. What I'd do instead is have it happen inside every subject. In history, look at where the source came from. In science, look at who funded it. Then it's a habit attached to real material rather than a lesson you passed. The hard part isn't teaching students that sources vary in quality — they know. It's getting them to check something that already agrees with them.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.