News

A virtual press conference on the joint-university research project entitled “Strengthening the Alignment of Residential Education and University Educational Aims” was held on January 29, 2021. The project is funded by the University Grants Committee and is the first in Hong Kong on the aims of university residential education.

The research team is led by Dr Samuel Chu, Associate Professor, Academic Unit of Teacher Education and Learning Leadership, Faculty of Education, HKU, and joined by representatives from the Education University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University as co-investigators.

The findings reveal that residential experience has positive impact on the participants’ academic, social and individual development. Based on the findings, the project team also provided several suggestions on multiple levels for moving residential education in Hong Kong forward.

The three-year project started in 2017 with around 1,700 local and non-local students and alumni from four universities participating each year. The research team also organised numerous study tours for hall residents and hall education personnel to visit top universities in the world to share good practices of hall experience.

To review the e-version of the press release and download relevant materials, please visit http://web.edu.hku.hk/press.

A virtual press conference on the fourth report from the “eCitizen Education 360” study was held on January 19, 2021 and was attended by more than 150 participants. The latest research results focus on how specific school leadership practices impact teachers’ preparedness for and effectiveness in online T&L.

The findings demonstrate the pivotal role of multi-level school leadership in fostering a culture of trust, collaboration and openness for pedagogical innovation, an indispensable quality of effective schools under the New Normal.

The project team also put forward several recommendations for schools to be better prepared under the New Normal, including external support for teacher professional learning and leadership development, participation in joint-school student-centred innovation projects, and the support to middle-level leaders in solving actual problems in the innovation process.  

The research team was led by Professor Nancy Law, Deputy Director of the Centre of Information Technology in Education of the Faculty, and Dr Tan Cheng Yong, Associate Professor, the Faculty’s Academic Unit of Social Contexts and Policies of Education.

For more details of the “eCitizen Education 360” Project, please visit https://ecitizen.hk/360. To review the e-version of the press release and download relevant materials, please visit http://web.edu.hku.hk/press.

We are happy to announce that a paper co-written by Dr Xiao Hu (Associate Professor, Academic Unit of Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences), Mr Jeremy Tzi-Dong Ng and Mr Ruilun Liu (PhD students) has been nominated for the Best Short Paper Award at iConference 2021.

The paper is titled “Development and Evaluation of a Digital Museum of a National Intangible Cultural Heritage from China”, and is based on a recent Knowledge Exchange project in which Dr Hu is the principal investigator. In the project, a digital museum called “Gifts of Lanmama” (https://lanmama.lib.hku.hk/) featuring various artisan embroidery techniques employed by the Miao people in Guizhou, China was built collaboratively by our Faculty, HKU Libraries and Guizhou Lanmama Museum of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Ethnic Minorities.

The paper describes the development of “Gifts of Lanmama” and reports a preliminary evaluation of the digital museum in terms of its usability and affordance for learning about cultural heritage. Some issues and challenges are also identified. The evaluation results offer insight for further improving the digital museum and other end-user-oriented digital presentations of similar intangible cultural heritage.

The result will be announced at the iConference held online in March 2021. The iConference is an annual gathering of a broad spectrum of scholars and researchers from around the world who share a common concern about critical information issues in contemporary society. It is organised by the iSchools organisation, a worldwide association of Information Schools dedicated to advancing the information field in the 21^st century.

Congratulations to the team!

We are delighted to announce that an innovative project by Dr Chen Gaowei, Associate Professor in the Faculty’s Academic Unit of Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences, has been awarded a grant of over HK$3 million by the Innovation and Technology Bureau of the HKSAR Government.

The project is entitled “A Visualization-enhanced Video-based e-Learning Platform (V2 e-Platform) for Teachers and Students”. The video-visualisation (V2) approach is an invention of Dr Chen’s which allows users to visualise and identify meaningful information in videos for learning purposes. The V2 e-platform will scale up this approach to transform educational videos into high-efficacy, low-cost resources for improving teaching and learning, ultimately benefitting a wide range of teachers and students at the local, regional and international levels.

Dr Chen’s project is being funded by the Innovation and Technology Fund for Better Living (FBL). The FBL is a scheme for funding innovation and technology projects which will make people's daily living more convenient, comfortable and safer, or address the needs of specific community groups.

Our hearty congratulations to Dr Chen on his remarkable achievement!

We are delighted to announce that Dr Shelley Tong, Associate Professor in the Faculty’s Academic Unit of Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences, is made an RGC Research Fellow.

Dr Tong’s project is titled “Understanding Strengths and Deficits in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia: Toward an Integrated Strength Deficit-Based Intelligent Diagnosis and Intervention System”. It aims to revamp current deficit-based reading remediation programmes by developing an Integrated Dyslexic Interface Design that underscores and capitalises on the individual strengths of children with developmental dyslexia.

The Research Fellow Scheme aims to provide sustained support and relief from teaching and administrative duties to exceptionally outstanding researchers at Associate Professor rank (or full Professor rank) at University Grants Committee-funded universities in Hong Kong, with a view to facilitating their full dedication to research and development and helping universities attract and retain research talent. As an awardee, Dr Tong will receive a fellowship grant at around HK$5.2 million over a period of 60 months. The fellowship will start in 2021.

Many congratulations to Dr Tong!

On December 8, 2020, a press conference was organised to announce Hong Kong students’ performance in mathematics and science in TIMSS 2019, the largest international study of mathematics and science education in the history of comparative studies. Professor Frederick Leung, the Chairman of Hong Kong Centre for IEA Studies, announced the findings of the Hong Kong component of TIMSS 2019 at the press conference concurrently with the official international press release at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France.

More than 580,000 Primary 4 and Secondary 2 students from 64 countries/regions and 8 benchmarking participants participated in TIMSS 2019 worldwide. In Hong Kong, 2,968 Primary 4 students and 3,265 Secondary 2 students from 139 primary and 136 secondary schools respectively participated in the assessment.

In TIMSS 2019, Hong Kong students continue to demonstrate remarkable performance in mathematics, occupying the 2^nd and 5^th positions in Primary 4 and Secondary 2 mathematics respectively. For Primary 4 and Secondary 2 science, Hong Kong students occupied the 15^th and 17^th positions respectively.

A full set of materials including the press release, photo, summary of findings, presentation file and tables are available for download at https://web.edu.hku.hk/media/20201208.

We are excited to announce an international, cross-disciplinary research collaboration on health professions education made possible through a Johns Hopkins 2020 Discovery Award. Dr Susan Bridges, Associate Professor in the Faculty’s Academic Unit of Social Contexts and Policies of Education, joins the project team as an international collaborator.

The Discovery Awards are given to interdisciplinary faculty teams across 11 units of JHU, aiming to solve complex problems and expanding the horizons of knowledge. The project, titled “From Jedi Knight to Jedi Master: Discovering the New Master of Health Professions Educator Leader” led by Dr Toni Ungaretti at JHU contributes to the discourse on framing the new “master” health professions educator leader concept – the identification of its attributes, and insight on approaches to cultivate it. It joins 40 successful proposals which stood out from 274 submissions.

Dr Bridges is an international collaborator, together with Dr Anne McKee from Kings College London, UK, and will provide external expertise from a curriculum perspective.

Many congratulations to the team!

We are delighted to announce a significant grant award for the research project titled “Reliable Knowledge for Health Care: Process and Practice of Shared Decision Making”, in which Dr Susan Bridges, Associate Professor in the Faculty’s Academic Unit of Social Contexts and Policies of Education, is an international partner. The project as a whole has received a grant of 3.7 million euros from the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland. In the sub-project in social scientific interaction analysis, Dr Bridges will collaborate as an external collaborator and scientific advisor in the planning and execution of interactional ethnography, and in theory development on information literacy. The sub-project has been funded with 1.2 million euros for the first three years. 

The project is led by Professor Johanna Ruusuvuori, Head of the Unit of Social Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Finland. The other external collaborators are Professor Markus Reuber, Medical School, University of Sheffield, UK; Dr Rebecca Barns, Senior Research Fellow, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, UK; and Dr Merran Toerian, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of York, UK.

We are delighted to announce that the following colleagues have won the University’s 2020 Teaching Excellence Awards:

Outstanding Teaching Award 

Individual award

Dr Anita Wong, Associate Professor, Academic Unit of Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences

Teaching Innovation Award

Individual award

Miss Nicole Tavares, Senior Lecturer, Academic Unit of Teacher Education and Learning Leadership

The Selection Panel was deeply impressed with the awardees’ dedication to teaching, their tireless and creative efforts to make learning enjoyable and challenging, and the impact that they have made on their students’ learning.  Many congratulations to the awardees!

HKU’s first-ever Virtual Information Day for Undergraduate Admissions took place on October 31, 2020 and was a resounding success. For our Faculty, Information Day is the annual flagship event for providing local secondary school students and associate degree students with undergraduate admissions information. We organised a range of online activities including a Faculty Central Talk in the morning and nine admissions talks in the afternoon. Real-time chats were also available throughout the event to answer incoming questions from the visitors. The event attracted nearly 1,700 participants.

Although a face-to-face Information Day was not possible due to the pandemic, a series of online activities were organised in the HKU iMonth (October 2020) prior to the Virtual Information Day, so as to provide prospective students with sufficient information. In the days leading up to the Virtual Information Day, several Taster Lectures were also delivered, to give the audience an impression of what it is like to study in the Faculty.

Professor A. Lin Goodwin, Dean of the Faculty, remarked, “The whole event demonstrated an excellent example of Faculty teamwork, as our teachers, administrative staff and students were all actively involved, and it made me very proud to be Dean of our Faculty.”

The virtual fair is still available throughout November 2020 and can be joined at https://hkuinfoday.vfairs.com.