Importance of developing Information Literacy

Last week, one S7 student asked me questions about the concept of grafting and cloning. I couldn't find the details from textbooks so I turned to the Internet and tried 'Wikipedia'. I keyed in the key words like 'grafting' and 'cloning' and located the information I needed. I thought this website might be useful to our students and introduced it to S4 students. When I demonstrated in the class how to use the website to locate information related to osmosis, diffusion and active transport, students were not amazed. I asked them why and their responses were "We can't understand the language and We don't know how to spell the key words in English". This drew my attention to the concept of information literacy that I came across in some training workshops. The most often quoted definition of information literacy was articulated in the Final Report of the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy (1989):

To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information... Ultimately, information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them.

The major barrier of developing information literacy among students in Hong Kong is not on infrastructure and computer skills because opportunities of gaining Internet access and the computer skills of young people in Hong Kong are among the best in OCED countries. The actual hurdle is the problems with the overall English standard. Just a glimpse of a few homepages informing us of world news like CNN and BBC can tell us the importance of mastering English as a second but world language. The gradual fall of the English standard makes our government's ambition of turning HK a regional hub for innovation, technology and communications absurd. Integrating the elements of information literacy into our school curriculum should be a pressing issue deserving a high priority in the agenda of education reform if we want our students to survive in the information age. However, The chance of success is slim if the English language standard of our students keeps on declinning.