In recent times the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has been very active in promoting the use of information technology (IT,) in schools. in light of (he urgent need to, mount extensive and comprehensive training programs for teachers, this paper will present some recent findings of teacher responses obtained from a staff development activity conducted for primary school teachers. Teacher use of IT, teacher perceptions related 10 issues of IT infrastructure and support, as well as leadership issues in schools will be discussed. The findings reveal how teachers currently view their capability to cope in light of government initiatives to encourage teachers to make effective use of IT. The three key elements of teachers ‘perceptions were (1) lack of time to explore and experiment: (2) need for personalized/customized on-site training with on-going support; and (3,) easy access to facilities. Despite the constraints teachers and principals were very supportive of government initiatives and were keen to he proactive in meeting this challenge.

Many students have difficulties in the learning of elementary statistics because they think the concepts are abstract. Besides traditional classroom instruction, teachers can use the World Wide Web (WWW) technology to enhance the teaching and learning of statistics. In this paper, the author wants to discuss how the WWW technology can:- serve as a teaching resource; elaborate on the statistical concepts; promote interactive learning; be available for individual learning; and prepare students for the world of learning and work in an information age.

Charged with the design and implementation of an evaluation framework for a new medical curriculum, the authors sketch some of the technical and human problems encountered with on-line evaluations and identify the need for a well planned and resourced approach towards a better co-ordination between the management of the Web environment and the Faculty. More importantly the accelerated pace of change of knowledge brought about by the greater accessibility of information through the use of media emphasises the urgency of a new orientation to teaching and learning.

The project entitled Higher Order Thinking Skills Targeted for University First-Year (HOTSTUF) was the concerted and coordinated efforts of teaching and non-teaching staff of a liberal arts university to stimulate, foster, and enhance higher-order thinking of two cohorts of first-year university students during the two-year duration of the project. The project aimed at creating a learning environment that was conducive to developing a culture of thinking, particularly thinking skills and good thinking dispositions. To achieve this objective, a series of programs subsumed under the four-component framework of the project were organized: (A) Thinking-in-Action Program, (B) Thinking-in-Operation Workshops, (C) Websites for Integrative Thinking, and (D) Formative and Summative Documentation, This paper briefly describes the diversity and scope of the programs of these components, the impact of these programs on the student participants, and the limitations of the project.

Many Hong Kong students find learning organic chemistry hard as the subject requires them to master complex knowledge and higher order thinking skills. This paper reports a case study of adopting ChemSense, a computer-supported collaborative learning package for learning and teaching of chemistry, to support the learning of organic chemistry for a group of matriculation level students in Hong Kong. Data regarding the students' views of the usefulness of collaborative learning and ChemSense were collected and analyzed. Although there is no statistical evidence to conclude that students who worked collaboratively can improve their individuals' knowledge of the subject matters better than those who did not, evidence of knowledge construction was identified when examining the content of students' discussions. The students in the experimental group also showed improvement in learning attitude and were positive towards the adoption of collaborative learning in studying organic chemistry.

This presentation shows some of the practical aspects of computational lexicography involved in the process of implementing a bilingual online glossary at the Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) based on a subject-specific glossary-assisted model (SSGA) with the aim of assisting Chinese learners undertaking English-medium courses in linguistics. The glossary was created using the standard online lexicon editing form designed by Greaves, Director of the Virtual Language Centre (VCL) project. Having logged on to a special server with their usernames and passwords, lexicographers are able to add and edit lexical entries online. The online glossary we have developed is bilingual and contains the following items for each term: The term itself (e.g. Pragmatics), Chinese equivalent, Definition (in English), Comments (e.g.noun), Examples, and Synonyms (if any). The project team also used a CGI web program developed by Greaves to link every word in the study units to VLC online lexicon, thus allowing students to access the lexical entry by simply placing the cursor over a word and double-click. It is well recognized that the speed at which students can absorb the unfamiliar vocabulary will affect the quality of their study and their mastering of the course content. Since the online bilingual glossary facilitates instant access to the meaning and pronunciation of unfamiliar words, much time and effort otherwise student spend in the traditional paper-based lexical search has been reduced. And as the SSGA based online bilingual glossary also integrates vocabulary, lexicon, concordancing and multimedia, our students can benefit from a comprehensive range of resources. The potential for SSGA lies in the application of the methodology tested so far to other courses, especially those from other disciplines such as science, to support students from a Chinese background, and indeed this has been planned for the second phase of the project.

This paper reports an in-depth observational study looking into how two learners, with different levels of competence in Chinese writing, went about using an online database for improving their writing of Chinese. The two learners were given a task to correct some erroneous sentences, which requires them to consult a large repository database of authentic sample sentences with common errors and suggested modifications. Interestingly, it was found that the more competent learner could quickly identify the categories of errors and devise a strategic plan on what to look for. In contrast, the learner weaker in Chinese failed to notice plausible errors and could only search for the given sentences in a pattern-matching manner. This indicates that simply providing the database as such to the learners is not enough and further the facilitation of the instructors to help learners to learn to identify the errors is far more important.

This study describes a web-based portfolio system in a Hong Kong teacher education context in which on-line tool was used to facilitate student teachers' reflection on their field experience during teaching practice. Assessment rubric was integrated into the web-based portfolio platform. Student teachers created and revised their reflective statements and artifacts according to pre-defined and self-defined learning domains for professional development. Automatic notification feature was also built in the system so that whenever a student teacher posted something on the platform, the supervising tutor was notified thus enhancing communication between the supervising tutor and the student teachers. Feedback and comments from both lecturers and student teachers were shared in a forum and such data were tracked by a database in the system. Preliminary finding shows that the web-based portfolio system enables the lecturers to give timely and informative feedback and the development process of such a portfolio encourages student teachers to think reflectively and to become a self-regulatory learner.

Education reforms have made important structural changes, in particular, the inclusion of Arts Education among the Key Learning Areas in the school curriculum and the launch of a five-year information technology (IT) in education strategy . This has generated the need for a strong field-based leadership that would bring together various stakeholders in education to collaborate on initiatives encouraging and supporting educational innovation in the reformtargeted areas. This paper describes an initiative within the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) called Alliance for Educational Innovation which plays a leadership role in implementing new visions of teaching and learning in cultural subjects. It discusses its several lines of work in areas such as teacher collaboratives, professional development, information dissemination, and development of educational technology resources that will contribute to the improvement of cultural subjects education in technology-rich environments.