There has been an increasing attention to integration of project-based learning into Asian school curricula. And the notion of learning community is a heated topic for learning to learn in knowledge-based societies. Yet the cognitive research on using web-based learning community for project-based learning is still under-developed in Asian contexts Based on literature review, some directions in collaborative learning strategies are suggested in web-based learning community or ecology. Through a scrutiny of basic functional tools of a web-based collaborative learning platform called Knowledge Community (KC), the paper endeavors to highlight the significance of four senses of scaffolding supports (in Vygotskian terminology) for knowledge co-construction and pedagogical facilitation in groups of primary and secondary (Grade 1-12) students in Hong Kong and Singapore. Copyright © 2004 全球華人計算機教育應用學會.

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.
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