This study explores teachers’ perspectives with regards to teaching English in virtual classrooms, specifically with regards to teaching English as a second language within the context of emergency remote learning in Hong Kong during COVID-19. Through undertaking thematic analysis of six interviews with English language teachers at a university in Hong Kong, this study explores how teachers view the benefits, challenges and personal and professional consequences of the shift to emergency remote teaching during the pandemic. Taking a social constructivist approach to the topic, the study also seeks to uncover how teachers view such provisions as being improved under future emergencies and with respect to online English language teaching moving forwards generally. This research topic contributes both to a longstanding debate on the ways in which digital technologies can enhance education and language learning, as well as the emerging body of literature examining how teachers and students have responded to the implementation of digital learning in online classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic. © The Author(s) 2023.

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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