The Lecturer Attachment Scheme (LAS) advocated in the Hong Kong Institute of Education aims at creating opportunities for the teaching staff to update their school teaching experience, participate in a real school setting and experience the work life of local teachers. Through the school attachment, the teacher educator will not only update their teaching experience and possibly build collaborative relationship with schools in staff development and research activities.
This paper describes two lecturers from the English Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Education who joined the Institute's attachment Scheme for their own professional benefit and development. During the two-week attachment period, the lecturers took over English teaching duties from two regular teachers and worked closely with the teachers. All their lessons were observed by the regular teachers and were video-taped. The lecturers tried different teaching approaches such as the incorporation of big books for the teaching of reading and materials adaptation. The lecturers brought with them what they perceive as 'good' language teaching in the classroom and attempted to verify whether theory and practice can be coherently integrated.
Field notes and journal data recording the lecturers' reflection and experience on the scheme and interview data probing into the teachers' evaluation of the LAS will be presented. It is affirmed that such attachment scheme can enhance professional development both for the teacher educators and for the teachers. It also enabled an avenue for follow-up school-based collaborative projects.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

This paper outlines the progress to date of a project to compile, analyse and share examples of innovative online assessment activities using; online testing; teamwork and collaboration; simulations and role plays, and dialogue with experts and across cultures. The aim of this research is to provide teaching academics and educational developers with examples of assessment strategies that have been successfully applied in higher education, and to derive a number of key principles about online assessment that will be useful for future research. The project involves case studies from two Australian universities, which have been used to develop an initial set of eight exemplars and analysed to identify commonalities and differences. In the next phase of the project, these will be shared with teaching staff from two Hong Kong Universities, who will be asked to assess the applicability of the assessment designs and approaches to their teaching contexts.
[Copyright of Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) at http://www.ascilite.org.au]

The open source learning management system (LMS), Moodle, has been adopted by many people and organisations around the world because it offers a tightly integrated set of tools said to be designed from a social constructivist perspective. However, what advantages does Moodle really offer over other commercially available LMSs such as Blackboard, from the perspective of the lecturer or the student? In this study, Moodle was used in five teacher education classes in Hong Kong in a variety of ways. The experience of these classes was evaluated by institutional evaluations of teaching and a questionnaire specific to the use of Moodle. The results indicated only a partial preference for Moodle over Blackboard. Implications for pre-service teachers are discussed.
[Copyright of Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) at http://www.ascilite.org.au]