A student-run organization called Hope and Talent Share For Friends has published a free computer guide available in both Korean and English and designed especially for elderly people and computer novices.
Founded in 2012, Hope and Talent Share for Friends is a non-profit organization that uses its members’ talents to perform community service at various events to give help and hope to those being served. Members attend weekly meetings to discuss current or upcoming projects that benefit the community. The group focuses on multiple aspects of community service. Currently, Hope and Talent is partnering with The Korea Daily to provide computer tutorial classes at the newspaper’s facilities in Koreatown.
Over the course of six months, Hope and Talent Share for Friends members regularly met in person to contribute different aspects of the computer guide after dividing up work amongst themselves. The oldest students, usually in the 11th or 12th grades, were chosen as the editors who would coordinate, edit and translate various components of the tutorial from English to Korean.
Some of the student writers included heartfelt messages at the end of the book.
“I cannot describe how rewarding this experience was to all of us. We … strove to make this book as simple and basic as possible and focused on the what most senior citizens mainly use,” said manual Editor-in-Chief Lacey Kim in an interview. “I hope many people can benefit from this book and no longer struggle but enjoy the new technology used by current society.”
The organization is currently planning to use the guide to conduct computer tutorial classes based on the book, personally teaching and training senior citizens and computer novices how to use computers in their daily lives.
