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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In this paper, an excerpt of teacher–student interaction in an EFL junior secondary science classroom in Hong Kong is analysed using the conversation analytic method of sequential analysis. The fine-grained analysis reveals that in the teacher's effort to engage her students in the co-construction of a scientific proof, the students' familiar everyday discourses (e.g. students' examples and experiences as expressed in their familiar language) need to be allowed to play a significant role. It also shows how translanguaging can be well-coordinated with multimodal practices (using blackboard drawings, gestures) to facilitate students' meaning-making in the inquiry-based teacher–student dialogue.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.988113]

Play is the characteristic behaviour of children aged between two to six. It is one useful way in which children can acquire developmental skills. According to theorists such as Sylva, Bruner and Genova (1976) and Gravey (1977), play had intellectual benefits. They believed that play experience was the optimal way of enhancing children's creativity and imagination. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC, 1988) states that a high quality early childhood programme provides a safe and nurturing environment that promotes the physical, social, emotional and cognitive development of young children and 'play' is no doubt an essential component of the developmentally appropriate practice. Following the world's trend, 'Learning through play' was first introduced to the pri-primary education of Hong Kong through the Visiting panel of Llewellyn in 1982. Then the Government endorsed their view by adopting the suggested pedagogy as the recommended method of teaching and learning in the local kindergarten in ECR2 (1986). The Government believed that by including the theory of 'learning through play' in the teaching education programme, the curriculum as well as the undesirable pedagogical strategies which had been identified (ECR2 1986) would then change amongst local kindergarten teachers. Has the problem released in ECR2(1986) been diminished after a decade? Is there any instructional paradigm shift witnessed in the early childhood education? A multi-case study was designed to collect qualitative data on the lived experience of the practices of the practitioners in 1996. A group of six in-service kindergarten teachers who were having their one- year Teacher Education Course (95-96) for kindergarten teachers of the Hong Kong Institute of Education were involved in the study. The three levels of reflection proposed by Schon (1987); namely, reflection-for-action, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action were used as means to collect holistic data of

In a learner-centred classroom, how much intervention a teacher should provide in the process of learning is a very important issue. The answer to this question is quite complex. Is there the concordance between the teacher’s expectations and the students’ expectations in key areas such as the respective roles in learning, classroom structure, teaching and even the role of school? These factors are related to the degree of teacher intervention and learner autonomy which will be expected and tolerated in the classroom. This is especially true in a classroom where the teacher and students come from different sociocultural environments. This paper will discuss inherent problems of instituting a learner-centred classroom where a lecturer, not from the dominant culture, has attempted to create a learner-centred environment. The presentation will discuss the implications and difficulties of such an approach using interview data from lecturers and students in a skill-based English course conducted at a teacher training institute in Hong Kong. The perceptions and expectations of both parties will be presented and explored. Discussion will counter around the implications of learner-centred instruction in a traditional educational system.

It has been estimated that there are globally over 20 million people using various features of the Internet. In particular, the World Wide Web(WWW) is developing very rapidly, especially for business application and it consists of interlinked hypermedia documents for retrieving and displaying information in form of text, pictures, audio, video and even interactive simulation. From an educator' s point of view, there are three main advantageous features of the WWW that can make it very special for educational usage: First, the teaching materials in hypermedia form are accessible around the world through networked personal computers and so the temporal and spatial constraint of classroom teaching are removed. Second, the multimedia features of the WWW documents (represented by Hypertext Markup Language, HTML) are well-known to be effective for presentation/ transmission of ideas and factual information. Third, the hyperlinkage of WWW documents provides not only links (i.e. WWW addresses or locations) to other documents as instantaneously accessible references but also a mode of nonlinear learning which resembles the association operation of human mind. However, the concept of teaching through the Internet has rarely been put into practice in the sub-degree level according to our knowledge in the Science discipline. Therefore, we have employed a simple model to establish a WWW home-page (located at http://www.hkstar.com/~hkiedsci) of a self-learning package on Introductory Digital Electronics for our HKIEd Science students enrolled in various types and modes of courses as well as for those AS/AL Physics students in Hong Kong. Apart from some qualitative feedback obtained from email, we have issued an evaluation questionnaire to every science student concerned to collect his/her suggestions for improvement of the contents of the topic and the design of the home-page and to reflect the student' s receptivity of learning through the Internet. The main results of our survey