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 | Youth Study Series No.19 |
The growth in the use of Internet communication and information technology (IT) in the past decade or so has had a tremendous impact on the form and medium of knowledge. Learning, traditionally acquired through the medium of print, has now migrated towards the use of multimedia, including the Internet, video, audio and other graphical approaches. In November 1998, the SAR Government issued a document "Information Technology for Learning in a New Era: Five-Year Strategy --- 1998/99 to 2002/03" which outlined a blueprint for IT reforms. What and where the obstacles of IT learning in education for the students of Hong Kong, has given rise to much controversy and expressions of deep concern. Through this exploratory study, we hope to increase our understanding of the issue. Only then can we make suitable directions for the formulation of policies and services in the future.
Both a qualitative study of teachers and a quantitative opinion survey of students are employed for this study. The qualitative study was conducted through in-depth focused-group interviews of teachers that are involved in information technology in their schools. The quantitative survey was conducted by telephone over five evenings from 18 to 28 September 1999. A total of 507 students, from secondary Form 1 to Form 5, were successfully interviewed.
In short, a typical picture of students' I.T. learning in the educational system can be summarised as follows: Most Hong Kong students have access to computers and the Internet and are familiar with its use for leisure and entertainment. In spite of students being ready, motivated and confident to learn new skills in I.T., they were not really given many opportunities in schools either to make use of I.T. for homework or to be taught in classrooms by teachers through multimedia. "An inadequate hardware facility in classrooms" was the top reason, as mentioned by the respondents, which accounted for this situation.
In the same vein, teachers expressed their concern over the inadequacy of IT facilities in classrooms throughout the focused-group interviews. The major complaint regarding hardware centred on the fact that, in most schools, computers are centralised in one or two special rooms. Besides, there were no points of connectivity to the Internet or Intranet which teachers can use. If teachers wish to use IT facilities, they have to use the computers and projectors in a mobile rack, or in another way, thirty to forty classes have to move in rotation to the special rooms to take their lessons. Thus, comparably, white chalk and blackboards are still important teaching tools in classrooms.
Apart from the inadequacy of IT facilities, insufficient technical support from the SAR Government to network maintenance and educational software development, have also greatly discouraged teachers from using IT in education. Many respondents indicated that even teachers with greater motivation felt the workload for preparing multimedia-teaching materials was unbearable in addition to their normal teaching work. A typical example is that a teacher has to work for a week to prepare a three-minute PowerPoint presentation.
The findings of the study also revealed that teachers are moving slowly to adjust to the demand of the proposed "paradigm shift" in teaching. It is quite understandable that without sufficient professional support or mechanisms for teacher enablement, the proposed change will not happen naturally.
In view of the above discussion, the Federation will recommend:
The IT education should go beyond "teaching IT means teaching computer classes". IT facilities should be provided beyond a school level and go down at a classroom level. All classrooms should be equipped with basic IT facilities, as well as points of connectivity to the Internet or Intranet which teachers can use.
The concern of how to encourage publishers to invest more in developing educational software in IT, as well as how to assist teachers to avoid the infringement of intellectual property rights when compiling teaching materials, needs to be addressed. The Federation recommends the Government to play a more active role in developing the quantities of quality educational materials.
To facilitate and motivate initiatives from schools, resource support in technical aspects should be sufficiently provided by the Administration. This is not only important to ensure the schools' proper functioning of the newly acquired computer equipment, but also to foster the emergence of a school-wide atmosphere conducive to the "paradigm shift" in the school environment.
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