BANDUNG, Telkom University – Digital literacy is an indispensable individual skill, especially when global-scale competition towards the Society 5.0 era continues to require people to adapt digitally. The ability to communicate, collaborate, think critically and creatively, and carry out digital marketing activities are some of the elements needed by the community, who are often called digital natives.
Lecturers from the School of Business Communication (FKB), the School of Business Economics (FEB), and the School of Creative Industries (FIK) organized the event entitled “Digital Literacy Conception of Future Digital Talent.” It acts as a Service activity for The Community (Abdimas), held last November partnered with SMP Telkom Purwokerto. According to the Principal of SMP Telkom Purwokerto, Widyatmoko said that educators at the school needed a precise understanding of Digital Literacy.
The Abdimas activity was divided into several sessions. They are Hybrid Focus Group Discussion (FGD) sessions in Bandung and Purwokerto, opened by Anggar Erdhina Adi as the Head of Community Service collaboration and warmly welcomed by the Principal of SMP Telkom Purwokerto, Widyatmoko as an abdimas partner. The event lasted for 2 (two) hours. Ghia guided it as MC and moderated by Martha Tri Lestari, a student, and lecturer in the Digital Public Relations (DigitalPR) FKB study program.
The first session of Abdimas raised sub-topics on Digital Literacy in education and How marketing works in the digital world where competent speakers were lecturers from the Faculty of Business Economics, Refi Rifaldi Windya Giri, and Happy Millanyanil.
“With qualified digital literacy skills, it will increase students’ ability in inquiry learning, namely the cycle of conducting searches, investigating phenomena, creating new content/works, discussing findings, and being able to reflect on the results for the next step independently,” said Refi.
In his presentation, Happy said that thanks to the development of internet technology, marketing can be done more massively at a lower cost. It opens up opportunities for more people to be able to market their products to a broader market. Teachers and students in the class need to understand this so that they can take advantage of this condition by participating in marketing their products through easily accessible digital media. On the other hand, as consumers, we are faced with much information and very diverse product choices.
“Teachers and students also need to understand how to sort information about products so that they are not wrong when making purchasing decisions. In this case, digital literacy needs to be provided so that teachers and students can act as good marketers and consumers, said Happy”.
In the following week, the material continued with the sub-topics Digital Talent Pipeline and Ethical and Effective communication skills presented by Martha Tri Lestari and Amalia Djuwita (Amel) as resource persons from the Faculty of Business Communication.
“Effective Communication, Decision Making, Functional Skills, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Cultural Understanding, Collaboration and Ability to find information are soft skills that need to be applied to build digital natives through the digital talent pipeline, said Martha.”
In addition, Amalia Djuwita said that there must be interactive communication in learning between educators and students. So, the feedback occurs, which allows students to improve the way of communication and the provision of knowledge to create messages that are conveyed appropriately and can be interpreted by students.
“Students in today’s era are required to have better ethics, have good character, and have personal and professional competence,” said Amel.
In the last session of this community service, the material presented was about Digital Design Thinking and Critical Thinking as Digital Literacy. The resource persons were lecturers from the Faculty of Creative Industries, namely Ardy Aprilian Anwar and Fencing Erdhina Adi.
In his presentation, Ardy said that we could enter and direct human Design Thinking patterns in the learning process. We will know more about human cognition and how an experience is formed from the various thoughts, cognitive processes, and emotions. To explore human beings’ “unseen” side, we can look at how students learn and question them.
“Digital literacy can support humans so that they observe the correct information (Vision), get the right words at the right time (Language), and ultimately make better decisions (Making Decisions) and solve more problems (Problem Solving). ), said Ardy.
Then the session closed with the presentation of Fencing Erdhina, who said that An understanding of Critical Thinking must accompany digital Literacy to students.
As educators, we must be aware that the way children think today is different because the world “may” be different.
“Directing students at the stage of good critical thinking about existing phenomena is the most important thing, said Fencing.”