The Symposium is co-organized by CITE and the Education and Manpower Bureau, HKSAR
A major focus for the educational reform initiatives in recent years in Hong Kong is on developing students' abilities as autonomous learners - to be able to identify their own learning goals, and strategies, to seek and evaluate information and to use them for the solution of real life problems. Project-based learning and online discussions have become popular across different KLAs as an approach to developing deep understanding and generic skills. Although huge amount of human and financial resources were devoted to create these new learning experiences in schools, very often students' actual learning outcomes deviate from the objectives. To address these issues, the Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE), The University of Hong Kong, launched a Quality Education Fund supported project "Establishing a scalable network of knowledge building schools" in 2004. The project is an initiative based upon the ongoing work of the Learning Community Project conducted in collaboration with the Institute for Knowledge Innovation Technology (IKIT) of the University of Toronto since 2001. Through integrating computer-supported collaborative knowledge building activities in the school curriculum, this project has helped numerous participating schools in developing greater insights into knowledge building and lifelong learning capabilities in students, achieving deep and satisfying learning.
The knowledge building approach is a widely recognized powerful learning vehicle across the curricular spectrum of languages, sciences, humanities and interdisciplinary project-based learning activities. It also provides a particularly relevant pedagogy for the multi-disciplinary subject liberal studies. Participating schools have the privilege of using IKIT's award winning platform, the Knowledge Forum?? (KF), for their knowledge building activities. Over the years, this project has accumulated a great deal of resources on curriculum design and facilitation for knowledge building as well as research findings on how students progress in learning and developing generic skills in different KLAs. The insights and experiences generated by the teachers and students from both the primary and secondary sectors, alongside the resources and research outcomes, have been incorporated into a professional development website under six themes:
1. What is Knowledge Building (KB)?
2. IT Tools for Knowledge Building
3. Designing KB Curriculum
4. Introducing KB to Students
5. Facilitating KB Activities
6. Assessing KB Learning Outcomes
The aim of the interactive symposium on 20th May 2006 (Saturday) is to disseminate best practices and share encouraging research findings with teachers who are interested in applying knowledge building in their teaching. Centered around the six themes above, activities in this symposium are designed to maximize the benefit both to teachers who have already engaged in similar work before as well as those who are new to this approach. Drawing on the rich experience of our primary and secondary KB teachers in KLAs such as primary school general studies and extra curricular activities, secondary level languages studies, liberal studies, sciences and humanities etc, the project teachers and the project team will highlight their insights and give pointers to the various resources in the professional development website. Participants will also have first-hand experience of using the latest release of Knowledge Forum? to support knowledge building during the symposium. Work not harder, but smarter is one of the outcomes that may ensue when we implement the knowledge building approach effectively in our teaching practice.
For enquiries, please call Mr. Johnny Yuen at 2241 5192 or email to knowledge.building@cite.hku.hk.