This paper sketches major developmental processes of building a web for workplace professional communication through Chinese and English languages at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. The strategic development of the web comprised three phases, namely, pre-design, design and post-design ones. In the pre-design phase, learners' needs in terms of the levels of web support and the necessary contents were assessed. Together with a comparative analysis of similar relevant webs offered by tertiary institutions in Hong Kong, the tentative assessment results were employed to generate a site plan for the web. In the design phase, when the web pages were written, a number of strategic factors were taken into consideration. In the post-design phase, the web was tested, modified and finalized through an evaluation survey. Eventually, new research issues relating to online distance learning and its further web advancement will be briefly addressed.
[Copyright of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre Journal is the property of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre at http://www.edb.org.hk/hktc]

The paper highlights the determinants for demand for private supplementary tutoring and their interrelationships in a case study of Hong Kong. Reviews of past local and international literature reveal several research gaps related to tutoring studies and lack of theoretical explanations for the emergence of tutoring demand. Based on relevant interview and survey data, some socio-economic and socio-cultural patterns of tutoring demand are depicted in terms of a multi-level socio-cultural argument for its nature and determinant relationships via some conceptual indicators. New issues and challenges to various educational fields are finally addressed.
[Copyright of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre Journal is the property of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre at http://www.edb.org.hk/hktc]

Facing recent holistic curricular reforms, project works and action research are key learning tools and methods at primary level in Hong Kong. By integrating information technology (IT) into general studies curriculum in the form of student-based project works, the authors tried to highlight several key stages, accounting for intra-teacher and inter-teacher dimensions of teacher professional development, by conceptualizing qualitative data patterns of organized learning activities, IT-induced pedagogical strategies and collegial collaboration in a local primary school through an action research. The reflexive teaching experiences could help improve teacher professional development when implementing similar school-based reform.

This paper is an evaluative report of forty Grade Seven students using a CALL courseware on enhancing learning English, in comparison with a control group of the same size with traditional pedagogy (non-IT) within two weeks. Unlike previous CALL research done on their students' learning attitude or oral ability in Hong Kong, the research focused on testifying the benefits of CALL to junior secondary students' learning English usage through a linguistic post-test, and depicting their perceptions of its user-interface design and instructional activities through a semi-structured survey. Research findings confirmed that in each academic ability group, mean post-test scores were higher when using CALL than not, and that median-ability students had the best post-test performance, compared with other ability groups. Survey responses helped improve the user-interface design with an attention to academic ability factor for future instructional activities.

In this paper, a phenomenographic approach was utilized to create learning spaces in which 182 Secondary Five students under the guidance of the teacher (the action researcher) learned to do projects on applying suitable web authoring techniques to construct school, school alumni and e-learning websites across three school years in a local school. By means of the knowledge-building principles in an online learning community, some qualitative patterns of learning variations on learning conceptions, applications and synthesis were articulated. Throughout the learning and teaching process, some learning and teaching conditions varied whilst others were kept invariant to articulate inter-student learning variations and thereby formulate feasible teaching approaches. Finally, some critical conditions for such learning variations were further conceptualized for increasing learning effectiveness, and implications for sustaining online learning community are drawn for further research.
本文通過現象圖析學分析182 位中五級學生在網頁設計及應用層面上的學習概念，尋找他們的學習變異， 從而建構嶄新的教學反思空間。在過去的三個學年中，學生在教師( 行動研究者) 的指導下，編寫學校、校友及電子學習等網頁。在學與教層面上，基於網上學習社羣的知識建構原則，調整某些學與教條件而令其他條件不變，從而探索學生相互的學習差異及改善教學策略。最後，通過行動研究反思，學習數變的某些重要條件進一步被概念化，而網上學習社羣的持續發展也作深入討論。
[Copyright of Journal of Youth Studies is the property of The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups at http://yrc.hkfyg.org.hk/]