The project entitled Higher Order Thinking Skills Targeted for University First-Year (HOTSTUF) was the concerted and coordinated efforts of teaching and non-teaching staff of a liberal arts university to stimulate, foster, and enhance higher-order thinking of two cohorts of first-year university students during the two-year duration of the project. The project aimed at creating a learning environment that was conducive to developing a culture of thinking, particularly thinking skills and good thinking dispositions. To achieve this objective, a series of programs subsumed under the four-component framework of the project were organized: (A) Thinking-in-Action Program, (B) Thinking-in-Operation Workshops, (C) Websites for Integrative Thinking, and (D) Formative and Summative Documentation, This paper briefly describes the diversity and scope of the programs of these components, the impact of these programs on the student participants, and the limitations of the project.

Many Hong Kong students find learning organic chemistry hard as the subject requires them to master complex knowledge and higher order thinking skills. This paper reports a case study of adopting ChemSense, a computer-supported collaborative learning package for learning and teaching of chemistry, to support the learning of organic chemistry for a group of matriculation level students in Hong Kong. Data regarding the students' views of the usefulness of collaborative learning and ChemSense were collected and analyzed. Although there is no statistical evidence to conclude that students who worked collaboratively can improve their individuals' knowledge of the subject matters better than those who did not, evidence of knowledge construction was identified when examining the content of students' discussions. The students in the experimental group also showed improvement in learning attitude and were positive towards the adoption of collaborative learning in studying organic chemistry.

This presentation shows some of the practical aspects of computational lexicography involved in the process of implementing a bilingual online glossary at the Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) based on a subject-specific glossary-assisted model (SSGA) with the aim of assisting Chinese learners undertaking English-medium courses in linguistics. The glossary was created using the standard online lexicon editing form designed by Greaves, Director of the Virtual Language Centre (VCL) project. Having logged on to a special server with their usernames and passwords, lexicographers are able to add and edit lexical entries online. The online glossary we have developed is bilingual and contains the following items for each term: The term itself (e.g. Pragmatics), Chinese equivalent, Definition (in English), Comments (e.g.noun), Examples, and Synonyms (if any). The project team also used a CGI web program developed by Greaves to link every word in the study units to VLC online lexicon, thus allowing students to access the lexical entry by simply placing the cursor over a word and double-click. It is well recognized that the speed at which students can absorb the unfamiliar vocabulary will affect the quality of their study and their mastering of the course content. Since the online bilingual glossary facilitates instant access to the meaning and pronunciation of unfamiliar words, much time and effort otherwise student spend in the traditional paper-based lexical search has been reduced. And as the SSGA based online bilingual glossary also integrates vocabulary, lexicon, concordancing and multimedia, our students can benefit from a comprehensive range of resources. The potential for SSGA lies in the application of the methodology tested so far to other courses, especially those from other disciplines such as science, to support students from a Chinese background, and indeed this has been planned for the second phase of the project.

This paper reports an in-depth observational study looking into how two learners, with different levels of competence in Chinese writing, went about using an online database for improving their writing of Chinese. The two learners were given a task to correct some erroneous sentences, which requires them to consult a large repository database of authentic sample sentences with common errors and suggested modifications. Interestingly, it was found that the more competent learner could quickly identify the categories of errors and devise a strategic plan on what to look for. In contrast, the learner weaker in Chinese failed to notice plausible errors and could only search for the given sentences in a pattern-matching manner. This indicates that simply providing the database as such to the learners is not enough and further the facilitation of the instructors to help learners to learn to identify the errors is far more important.

This study describes a web-based portfolio system in a Hong Kong teacher education context in which on-line tool was used to facilitate student teachers' reflection on their field experience during teaching practice. Assessment rubric was integrated into the web-based portfolio platform. Student teachers created and revised their reflective statements and artifacts according to pre-defined and self-defined learning domains for professional development. Automatic notification feature was also built in the system so that whenever a student teacher posted something on the platform, the supervising tutor was notified thus enhancing communication between the supervising tutor and the student teachers. Feedback and comments from both lecturers and student teachers were shared in a forum and such data were tracked by a database in the system. Preliminary finding shows that the web-based portfolio system enables the lecturers to give timely and informative feedback and the development process of such a portfolio encourages student teachers to think reflectively and to become a self-regulatory learner.

Education reforms have made important structural changes, in particular, the inclusion of Arts Education among the Key Learning Areas in the school curriculum and the launch of a five-year information technology (IT) in education strategy . This has generated the need for a strong field-based leadership that would bring together various stakeholders in education to collaborate on initiatives encouraging and supporting educational innovation in the reformtargeted areas. This paper describes an initiative within the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) called Alliance for Educational Innovation which plays a leadership role in implementing new visions of teaching and learning in cultural subjects. It discusses its several lines of work in areas such as teacher collaboratives, professional development, information dissemination, and development of educational technology resources that will contribute to the improvement of cultural subjects education in technology-rich environments.

Given the advancement of information and communications technologies (ICT), a number of ways of building learning communities in schools have been developed in recent years. Realizing the impact of this new learning approach, six primary schools in Hong Kong engaged in building learning communities in science curriculum. During the science project works, students from different schools participated in knowledge construction using Knowledge Forum, a computer mediated communications (CMC) platform. This paper reports the results of the analysis of students' discussion and interviews of students as well as teachers to explore the processes of knowledge construction and the role of ICT from the different ways that students and teachers experienced in building learning communities through Knowledge Forum. Implications for pedagogical change will also be discussed.

To solve the problem faced by most of the students in Hong Kong who conduct recipe learning, we would like to enhance their understanding by web-based interactive multimedia learning tools. Nevertheless, we find that the existing packages are limited in functionality and user-friendliness. Worst of all, very few of them are Internet-based. Therefore, we develop our own Internet tools, including two-dimensional geometric and vector plotters, a time evolution three-dimensional plotter and an Internet mathematical equation editor. All these tools have the following features: they are &ser-friendly, interactive, dynamic, extendible and Internet based. Hence, they are very suitable to be utilized as teaching tools. A research has been conducted to test their effectiveness. The result shows that students welcome the use of Internet-based learning tools and achieve better understanding after using them. This is of course very rewarding and, thus, we are highly motivated to develop more tools of this kind to supplement the normal lecturing of d4fferent subjects. More detailed information can be found at http://vied.eee.hku.hk.

For nearly 30 intakes over 15 years, Charles Sturt University has delivered a distance education course which operates with Australian and, for the last 6 years, Hong Kong students. Since the course has made extensive use of computer based materials as well as computer mediated communication over that time, some valuable lessons have been learnt. While some of these have to do with institutional and management issues, many are about the differences between theory and practice.
The use of computer mediated communication increases workload rather than relieving it as some might suggest. While in some respects, students may feel that they are getting a better service with electronic communications and materials, there is also a severe penalty to be paid.
On balance, this situation favours the use of such technologies but not sufficiently to result in enthusiastic adoption. A key area involves the examination of how effectively the static and dynamic resources are attuned to the educational needs of the students. Activities which force a synchronisation are poorly received compared to ones which operate asynchronously. Similarly, electronic resources which simply replace existing printed material without a large amount of 'value adding', have also been found to be of dubious value.