Designed to make use of the immense power of World Wide Web (WWW) and facilitate a paradigm shift in education, VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) is a new game-based situated learning paradigm which aims to enable student-centered learning taking place in a game-based interactive virtual environment Briefly speaking, the VISOLE approach is composed of 3 phases in which students have to (Phase 1) preliminarily acquire some high-level knowledge in specific subject domains through teachers' scaffolding; (Phase 2) actively participate as a game character in a game-based virtual interactive environment to construct knowledge and skills from their near real-life game-play experiences; (Phase 3) reflect and generalize their game-based learning experiences through teachers' debriefing
Under the present theoretical context of learning, digital games and game-based learning, this dissertation exploited and reinforced the VISOLE learning paradigm It also delineated the design and development of the first VISOLE game---"Farmtasia" and presented the empirical research on investigating the educational realization and accomplishment of VISOLE
Based on the specificity of educational technology research, "Development Research Method" was adopted as the methodological framework in the whole study Under this framework, a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed for data collection and analysis, including the knowledge pre- and post-test, generic-skill test, perception survey, in-depth interviews as well as artifacts of students' reflective journals, reports and game-playing records All of these intensively focused on investigating students' and teachers' perceptions, students' learning motivation, behaviors, effectiveness with respect to the VISOLE approach and researching the design strategies for situated educational games
In the present research, most of the teachers and students were basically positive towards VISOLE

In November 1998, the Hong Kong Government published the policy document entitled "Information Technology for Learning in a New Era Five-Year Strategy 1998/99 to 2002/03" and defined the goals and the scope of the development of Information Technology in education in Hong Kong One of the goals is to encourage using Information Technology (IT) in education and to promote students' ability in handling information As the role of IT is becoming more and more important in education, schools themselves have also implemented IT to various extents The main purpose of this study is to explore the impacts of the external environment on the development of IT in Hong Kong primary schools and examine also the relationship between the use of IT in education and teaching effectiveness in Hong Kong primary schools
This study uses a quantitative approach to achieve the above purposes Questionnaires were sent to 823 teachers from 25 Hong Kong primary schools to solicit their views on the impact of IT in school education, the use of IT education and their perceptions of teaching effectiveness
The School Environment Constraint Instrument developed by Lam (1989) was adopted to meet the context of Hong Kong primary schools and modified for this study Two new factors "New Arrivals" and "Language Policy" are used to replace the original factors of 'Ethnicity' and 'Second Language' The other two research instruments which measured "Information Technology Development" and "Teaching Effectiveness" were developed by the Researcher
The results of the research indicate that: (1) the "Policy" factor and "Funding" factor had a high, significant correlation with the different aspects of IT development of Hong Kong primary schools; (2) a school with well-developed IT had a positive significant correlation with "Teaching Effectiveness"
Recommendations have been made for school administrators' consideration in the development of IT systems in primary schools and ways of improving

Over the last decade, educational reformers in Hong Kong have targeted teacher development and learning as a key area of need As part of this movement, different external change agencies began developing partnerships with school as attempts to enhance the quality of teacher professional development Such partnerships have operated for a number of years, but, to date, their efficacy has been largely unexplored This research, taking teachers' implementation of project learning as an example, aims to explore the impact of teacher-change agency partnerships on teacher learning The study is important in helping educators to better understand the difficulties teachers face when engaging in changes and also teachers' learning need This research also reveals the effects of teacher-change agency partnership and its impact on teacher learning This study can shed lights on ways of curriculum change and teacher development
The research posed four questions: (1) What difficulties do teachers face while carrying out project learning in school? (2) What kind of learning did teachers experience while involved in the teacher-change agency partnership? (3) Within the context of educational change, did teacher-change agency partnerships have an impact on teacher learning? (4) What do teacher-change agencies need to consider if partnership is to achieve positive results?
Five experienced primary school teachers were involved in the study In-depth interviews and non-participatory observation were used to collect data Based on thick description of five cases individually and a comprehensive comparison among them, the research revealed: (1) Teacher trainers need to take a multi-dimensional view to study the difficulties teachers encountered in implementing reform initiatives; (2) Teacher learning should take account of both "teacher" and "learning" The research highlighted that teacher professional development and personal growth are closely interrelated; (3) In different sectors