This article reports the results of an attempt to integrate a collaborative technology, a wiki, into learning within a course in a teacher education program based on social constructivist learning theory. The current study aimed to explore student-teacher acceptance of the proposed pedagogy and to identify specific learning style preferences that might be favourable to accepting the proposed pedagogy. A total of 56 student teachers studying a General Education (GE) course in a teacher education institute in Hong Kong participated in the study. They completed a number of collaborative tasks using a wiki during the learning process, and were then invited to complete a questionnaire designed to solicit their perception on the usefulness of wikis and their attitudes towards using a wiki, and 39 of them also returned a learning styles inventory which was used to identify the learning styles profile of the student-teacher samples. The findings reveal favourable perceptions of the use of a wiki as a collaborative learning tool in the course. Qualitative data collected from open-ended questions also reflects similar favourable results. Active learners were also found to be significantly different from reflective learners in accepting the wiki as a learning tool.
[Copyright of Australasian Journal of Educational Technology is the property of ASCILITE]

This study examined how students in a Hong Kong high school used Diigo, an online annotation tool, to support their argumentative reading activities. Two year 10 classes, a high-performance class (HPC) and an ordinary-performance class (OPC), highlighted passages of text and wrote and attached sticky notes to them to clarify argumentation structures and to represent and share argumentation processes. Analysis of annotations revealed that highlighting was the most frequently used online annotation feature. The HPC made significantly more sticky notes and used them more to annotate terms, claims and judgments than the OPC. The study suggests that Diigo is a promising tool for supporting reading-to-argue. The findings may be of value to teachers and researchers in designing online annotation tools that more effectively foster the process of reading-to-argue.
[Copyright of Australasian Journal of Educational Technology is the property of ASCILITE. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet.html]

This study investigates the learning outcomes of 25 student teachers in an online video-based learning community (VBLC). The students were participants in the teaching method course of a core primary subject in the two-year part-time Postgraduate Diploma in Education at a teacher education institution in Hong Kong. During the study, the student teachers served as both video producers and community members. Data were drawn from the student teachers' written comments and feedback recorded in the VBLC and the post-course interviews. Based on Biggs and Collis's Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy, the majority of comments and feedback were classified as uni-structural, but more sophisticated responses could also be found. The interviews revealed that the student teachers benefited from the opportunities of peer interaction and self-reflection. The study thus makes suggestions for further improvement of the operation of the VBLC.
[Copyright of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2012.669828]

As learning technologies increasingly facilitate the internationalisation of subject offerings, it becomes correspondingly important to try and ensure that the needs of diverse student groups are met, and to provide for ongoing improvement of their learning experiences. A variety of evaluation procedures is valuable in this respect, but particularly those that illuminate these experiences. This kind of information provides a rich source of data for teachers to use as a basis for reflective practice to inform the continuing refinement of teaching and learning approaches, and curriculum development. The nature of reflective practice also allows for its inclusion in the students' learning processes, thus simultaneously providing a means for improving the quality of their learning and contributing to their future professional lives, whilst offering a further set of perspectives to inform subject development.
This paper describes the use of reflective practice as a practical means of converging a range of non-positivist approaches to inform the teaching of a core undergraduate accounting subject; offered in Australia to on-campus students, distance education students and Victorian Year 13 school students, as well as to overseas students in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. It also shows that demands by the accounting profession for universities to improve learning to cope with the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent within professional life can be met, in part, by reflective practice.
[Copyright of Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) at http://www.ascilite.org.au]