Category: e-learning

How collaborative technology can facilitate and enrich blended or flipped classroom activities

Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education

About the Seminar
The seminar will give an overview of the recently published book, titled ‘The Wiki-Way of learning’, which has been translated into Chinese.

The Wiki-Way of Learning’ was written by over 10 authors from different countries. It describes a theoretical approach of learning using collaborative technologies, scaffolding models and contains many hands-on examples of using collaborative Web pages with learners ranging from primary school up to university level. Target audience includes lecturers, teachers and pre-service teachers.

Following an introduction by Prof. Mark Guzdial, a pioneer in using Wikis in education, the book gives a theoretical overview of collaboration and the social implications of the participative. Two different scaffolding models for learning are presented. The book also includes a description of Wiki-engines as a flexible tool for collaboratively creating, linking, revising and regrouping hypertext content. Such description enables readers to look into Wikis with the focus on its content and content creation process. Last but not least, different examples of tested and reflected learning scenarios using the two models and the Wiki described above are presented. Three of the presented learning scenarios have been set up and tested in Hong Kong and Mainland China. A more ‘hands-on chapter’ delivers information around strategies for setting up a learning unit using the ‘Wiki-Way of learning’ and about how to choose the appropriate Wiki-engine for a particular education setting.

The original book in German has been produced under OER (open educational resources) license and is accessible online for free. Readers can contact the authors and submit comments on each paragraph (the online Chinese version will follow soon). This new type of cross-media publication format will be discussed at the end of the talk.

About the Speakers
Dr. Michele Notari is a lecturer at the University of Teacher Education in Bern, Switzerland and was an honorary assistant professor in the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. He has published articles in key journals in the area of technology-enhanced learning, a book and several book chapters related to collaborative learning using participative technologies. He is Editor of a special edition of the Journal of Educational Research and Evaluation, board member of Wikisym, the international symposium on open Collaboration, the international Conference on Mobile Learning, and International Mobile Learning Festival. He holds a master degree in biology and computer sciences from the University of Berne, and a master degree in educational technologies from the University of Geneva. His research focus is on using participative technologies for formative assessment and effective collaboration.

Please register at http://www.cite.hku.hk/news.php?id=510&category=cite

Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education

CITE Seminar Series 2013/2014

Joint seminar of CITE and the Sciences of Learning Strategic Research Theme – The assessment and teaching of 21st century skills

About the Seminar
The Assessment & Teaching of 21st-Century Skills Project (ATC21S) began with the definition of the concepts of 21st-century skills. These were considered, analysed and organised within a knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and ethics (KSAVE; Binkley et al. 2010) framework. This paper explores the next phase of the project with regards to a combination of two of the key skills – collaborative problem solving. It outlines the research and development program that is expected to yield innovative, technology-based, interactive, complex group and individual analyses of performance within a collaborative problem solving context. The project is still a work in progress. The current phase of the project constitutes development of tasks that can be completed in classrooms. The tasks can be used to explore the thought processes and strategies that students use as an individual within a group to solve both well defined and poorly defined problems. We illustrate ways in which tasks can lend themselves to coding to yield information that is usable by teachers formatively to improve student performance.

In developed economies changing employment practices demand changes in how students are assessed and taught with a focus on 21st-century skills. Employment opportunities increasingly demand collaboration as well as problem-solving skills. This project works with a definition of collaborative problem including both cognitive and social perspectives to examine the process. It examines the circumstances under which collaborative problem solving might best take place, and outlines a structure through which the contributing processes can be monitored in an electronic environment.

About the Speakers
Patrick Griffin is a former faculty member of the School of Education at HKU. He currently holds the Chair of Education (Assessment) at the University of Melbourne and is Director of the Assessment Research Centre. He is the Associate Dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Professor Griffin was awarded the John Smythe medal for research in profiling literacy development. He is a project team leader for UNESCO in southern Africa, and was awarded, in 2005, a UNESCO Research Medal by the Assembly of Ministers of Education from Southern African nations. Professor Griffin is a World Bank consultant in Vietnam and China, leading national and international teams in studies of literacy and numeracy assessment. He developed a system of teacher assessment recently signed into law by the Vietnam Government and applied to more than 380,000 teachers. He has led the development of leadership frameworks for school principal and instructional development models for classroom teachers in Victoria. His work focuses on item response modelling applications in interpretive frameworks for criterion referenced assessment and its application of item response modelling to performance assessment. He is currently he executive director of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills Project and has co edited the volume published by Springer. Patrick Griffin, Barry McGaw and Esther Care (editors) (2011). Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills. Springer.

Please register at
http://www.cite.hku.hk/news.php?id=509&category=seminar

Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education

About the Seminar
Surprisingly few naturalistic studies exist of how people select books and music ‘in the wild’–that is, in a physical library, bookstore, or music shop. This seminar reports on a series of observational studies of people interacting with large public collections of books and music, spanning 10 years. The insights gained into how people prefer to interact with the collections suggest directions for research and development in providing access to digital collections.

This seminar will be instructive for those who work with and/or are interested in digital collections, including researchers and students in the library and information, education, humanities, computer and communication technologies, as well as librarians in higher education and teacher-librarians in schools.

About the Speakers
Sally Jo Cunningham is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Waikato University (New Zealand). She is a founding member of the New Zealand Digital Libraries Research Group, who are the developers of the Greenstone software to support the development and management of digital document collections. Her research primarily focuses on digital library users and their information behaviour, over text, image, video, and music documents; she is particularly interested in how information behaviour changes as people move to digital documents, and in how we can support the ‘non-native’ behaviour seen with physical collections, in the digital library. Her work is primarily qualitative and ethnographic, though she does indulge in more technically oriented research projects on occasion. She is also an active researcher in the Computer-Human Interaction and Music Information Retrieval communities.

Please register at
http://www.cite.hku.hk/news.php?id=508&category=seminar

Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education

About the Seminar
Pilot projects or schemes have been commonly used as mechanisms for trying out new curricula or pedagogical approaches, including e-Learning. However, what is to be gained through a pilot is not always clear, nor what are the necessary design constituents for a productive pilot. Further, pilots are typically designed to run for a few years, and support is usually withdrawn when the planned changes are barely implemented. On the other hand, it takes years before the full impact of a pilot could be observed, beyond the scope of associated evaluation studies.

This seminar explores the question of how the benefits of e-Learning pilot projects can be maximized by examining an on-going e-Learning Pilot Scheme in Hong Kong funded by the HKSAR Education Bureau (2011-2014) and the UK ICT Test Bed project (2002-2006) funded by the UK Government. Prof Nancy Law will provide an overview of the HK e-Learning Pilot Scheme and the key findings arising from the 2nd Year Evaluation Report, leading to some important questions for consideration regarding the anticipated sustainability and impact of the e-Learning pilot at this juncture.

Prof Bridget Somekh will (a) present an overview of the UK ICT Test Bed Project, (b) examine the mechanisms for managing change built into the project’s design and the predicted and unexpected aspects of the project’s development over the four years; (c) highlight the key findings that make interesting comparisons with the HK e-Learning Pilot Scheme; and (d) make suggestions about what can be learnt about sustainability and scalability of the ICT Test Bed project.

About the Speakers
Dr Bridget Somekh is Professor of Educational Research (Emeritus) in the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her research interest is the process of innovation and the management of change, in particular changes in teaching and learning practices and the impact of ICT on users and their organizations. Between 2000 and 2007, she directed a number of national evaluations studies, including the ImpaCT2 (DfES), ICT Test Beds (DfES) and Primary Schools Interactive Whiteboards (SWEEP) evaluations of the impact of the UK government’s investment in ICT for schools. Bridget is internationally known for her work in both ICT in Education and action research to support the management of change. She is currently external consultant for the Research Study on the Pilot Scheme on e-Learning in Schools at HKU.

Professor Nancy Law is currently Deputy Director of the Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE) in the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong, after serving as its Founding Director for 15 years from 1998. She serves/has served on a number of policy advisory boards/working groups related to ICT in education for the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong government and other community groups. Nancy is internationally known for her work on international comparative studies of pedagogical innovations and information technology and models of ICT integration in schools and change leadership. She has co-led the international SITES 2006 study and served on the Board of Directors of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. She is currently an Executive Editor of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning and is frequently sought after to provide expert input/consultancy to the European Commission, UNESCO and OECD on various aspects of technology-enhanced learning.

Please register at
http://www.cite.hku.hk/news.php?id=505&category=seminar