Abstract— Digital divide has been heatedly discussed in business, politics, economics, and so on. However, viewpoints from educational perspective are urgently needed since the digital divide in education is considered both the miniature and one of the most crucial causes of that in society. Information literacy emerged as a new concern for quality use of technologies besides the original aspects of digital divide: access and usage. This paper attempted to identify whether there are any differences among postgraduate students from a university in southern China in terms of four sub categories of information literacy respectively: information consciousness, information ethics, information knowledge, and information ability by adopting self-reported questionnaires. Results showed no significant differences considering both between females and males, and between senior postgraduates and junior postgraduates；However, the overall low information literacy scores indicated improvement is wanted, especially in consideration of information knowledge, which was the weakest and causing a information literacy divide at inter-individual level; Analysis of both separate and mean ranking of students’ four information literacy categories suggested that in order to promote a sustainable higher information literacy level, we must enhance each subfield. Finally, based on this study, limitations and suggestion were also provided.

Index Terms—Information literacy, digital divide, e-learning, educational technology.

F. A. Author is with Faculty of Education, The University of Hongkong, MingMei Yu, Hongkong , China (e-mail: mmyu@hku.hk).
S. B. Author is with Faculty of Education, The University of Hongkong, HaiQing Lin, Hongkong, China.

Cite: MingMei Yu and HaiQing Lin, "New Digital Divide?_Self-reported Information Literacy of Postgraduates at a University in Southern China," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 97-102, 2011.