The development of physical education and sports in tertiary institutions in Hong Kong was influenced by the tradition and structure of the institutions involved, compounded by a change from a four-year undergraduate programme to a three-year one. The different programmes offered at local institutions were highlighted and future trends were suggested.

The two-year longitudinal case study reported in this paper documents a non- Cantonese speaking mainland Chinese student's language learning experiences in Cantonese- dominant Hong Kong, who came to pursue undergraduate studies in an English-medium university. Using a sociocultural approach, this paper focuses on three biographical episodes. which recount how the student attempted to open up alternatives within the contextual structures and seek new learning opportunities, how she came to realize her limitation and withdrew from her early active pursuits, and how she followed other mainland Chinese students in memorizing words and attached her own meanings to it. The paper highlights the social, cultural, arid politic aspects of her strategy use in the learning context and argues that learners' biographical experiences are an important avenue to understand learners' strategy use as a complicated phenomenon revealing the interplay between learners' agency and contextual structures.

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 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.

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.