Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 2001

T h e E d u c a t i o n Department's large-scale i n f r a s t r u c t u r a l project which debuted last year— the Hong Kon g Education C i t y — has also been coordinated and managed by the Ho n g Kong School Net. The aim of this project is to make Ho n g Ko ng a leader in the application of IT i n education. Prof. Wong Po-choi has been seconded f r om the CUHK Department of Information Engineering t o t h e I n f o r m a t i o n Systems D i v i s i on of the Education Department of the HKSAR to serve as its i n - hou se c on s u l t an t as well as the project director of HKEdCity. Hi s contributions to IT i n education was given recognition by the government, w h i c h awarded h i m a Medal of Honour in 2001. HKEdCity serves as a single search engine for people seeking educational information and resources. It also liaises with service providers to offer quality Internet and intranet services to schools. More importantly, it takes a leading role in promotingIT culture and the use of IT for life-long and life-wide learning to schools, teachers, students, parents, and the public. Since its inception over a year ago, the site has recorded 20 million hits. With over 800 ETV programmes, it is the largest educational website in Asia. Prof. Wong Po-choi said, The wave of educational reforms all over the world in recent years has been the result of developments in IT The Department of Information Engineering forsaw way back in the early 90s that the Internet would change the whole educational and cultural scene. Yet up to the mid-90s, computer centres were non-existent in Hong Kong's schools. Developing the use of IT in education would not be easy, not to mention keeping up with the IT era. For example, it was impossible for all schools to have a computer centre considering the financial and human resources involved. Hence we thought of making the University the computer centre of all the schools in the territory , helping them build software and hardware systems, manage e-mail and servers etc. Before 1998, there were fewer than 10 schools with computer systems. With the help of the Hong Kong Cyber Campus, there are now over 900. Through HKEdCity, IT application will extend from the campus to all levels of society.' He reveals that the next step would be to examine, jointly with the schools, how to improve the effectiveness of online teaching and learning. CHINES E UNIVERSIT Y BULLETI Autumn • Winter 2001 26