During the COVID-19 pandemic, attending after-school activities now becomes a luxury to students, which used to establish interests, friendships and social networks in an informal setting. Students lost contact with peers and teachers and were forced to attend blended courses at home, which may constitute threats to their non-academic issues, especially social needs and mental health of the most vulnerable students. This article overviews a new interpretation of extracurricular activities (ECAs) to teach artificial intelligence (AI) via a social networking site (SNS) among junior secondary school students in Hong Kong. A three-stage action research with the use of semi-structured interviews, motivational surveys and lesson observation was conducted. Based on how students perceived such pedagogical changes, the teachers employed various strategies to transform the “after-school” activities online. The investigation presented the planning processes on how to transform the informal learning activities to an online mode via SNSs that can reach the roles of ECAs in schooling. Our study indicated that meaningful activities rely on teachers’ leading role to build a collaborative social media environment in order to facilitate social engagement among students. Copyright © 2021 Redfame Publishing Inc.

This qualitative study has investigated how a group of bilingual university students in Hong Kong understand digital citizenship and construct it through digital literacy practices in social media. Drawing on interview data and examples of digital activity shared by the students, we adopt the theories of digital literacies and translanguaging and transsemiotizing to reveal how they construct digital citizenship through an complex interplay between several factors, most prominently (1) a variety of digitally mediated social, cultural and educational practices the students engage in, (2) their agency of deploying diverse linguistic and semiotic recourses to achieve varied communicative effects in different settings and (3) their personal pursuits of intellectual and professional development and social engagement in a digitalized and globalized society. We then discuss how the findings can enrich our understanding of digital citizenship and its relationship with digital literacies in a multilingual and multicultural context such as Hong Kong. The implications for digital citizenship education are also discussed. Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.

This study explores critical incidents regarding differing cultures-of-use in telecollaboration against the backdrop of Hong Kong and German teacher education contexts. The rationale for the exchange was to model technology use and task design with the ultimate goal of internationalizing teacher education and supporting global citizenship. Participants in this project are 58 English majors in a graduate-level sociolinguistics course at a public research institution in Hong Kong and 15 EFL student teachers in a language teaching and new media elective course at a public education university in Germany. Using social media tools for interaction such as Facebook, Skype, WeChat, and WhatsApp, 11 telecollaborative teams engaged in three sequential tasks: (a) engaging in topical exchanges using Facebook, (b) writing a literature review in Google Docs, and (c) making recommendations on team websites using Wix. Research questions focus on critical incidents identified by participants during these tasks, particularly in relation to tool engagement. Data triangulation includes reflections, surveys, and online interactions. Findings indicate that the majority of Hong Kong teams cite low experience with certain tools, unfamiliarity with alternative tools (e.g., WeChat), and differences in tool access and use as constraints in achieving effective communication. Implications address sensitizing participants to their partners' tool socialization through implementing the critical incident technique.
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The rapid development of social media tools has increased interest in their pedagogical value. It has been suggested that social media tools such as wikis can promote online collaborative and interactive learning. This study investigated the value of wikis in supporting collaborative group writing quality among secondary school students in Hong Kong. Students from a local secondary school engaged in group writing projects using Pbworks, a popular wiki tool. Data were gathered from (1) the revision tracking history, (2) a questionnaire on the perceived pedagogical value of the wiki, and (3) group interviews with students. Findings showed that students who made more collaborative revisions on the wiki produced higher-quality writing output. In general, students reported a moderately positive attitude towards the pedagogical value of the wiki. The findings suggest that wikis promote collaborative writing, but teachers need to adopt pedagogical strategies that would equip students to use wikis.
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