This research aims to study the perception of school practitioners on the core values of information literacy in the ubiquitous information society. An information literacy framework has been proposed that includes four dimensions and eleven derived standards. Seventeen focus group discussion sessions were conducted to gain an understanding of the views of school practitioners. The research findings show that information literacy education should be designed with the humanistic rationale of guiding learners to develop information processing skills, which requires both cognitive capability and the associated affective elements. Students should further develop in the meta-cognitive and socio-cultural domains.

With the integrated use of quantitative and qualitative research methods, this chapter describes the learners’ problem-solving processes and the strategies they used under a pedagogy called Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment (abbreviated as VISOLE). By recording learners’ operations in the game, and collecting their game logs (BLOG), summary reports, and interview records, also based on the observations done by the researchers, it is found that the problem solving strategies that learners used in VISOLE primarily included: (1) trial and error, (2) random, (3) purpose-oriented, (4) starting from simple, (5) adventure, (6) comprehensive, (7) focused, (8) index, (9) BUG, (10) entertainment strategies, etc.

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) is a teacher-facilitated constructivist pedagogical approach to empower game-based learning. In combination with scaffolding, situated cognition, reflection, and debriefing, VISOLE aims at providing students with opportunities to acquire subject specific knowledge in a multi-disciplinary fashion and sharpen their higher-order thinking skills for problem solving. Farmtasia is the first online game designed to facilitate the VISOLE approach. We conducted a qualitative case study, in the setting of formal curricular teaching in a secondary school, to look into the course of students' learning in VISOLE. This paper discusses a part of the entire study, focusing on delineating an impeding phenomenon, arbitrary gaming, which emerged in an academic achievement-oriented student's learning process. The findings provided insights into the issue of implementing VISOLE and game-based learning in general in school education.

Apart from the ability of computer games to make learning more interesting, a number of researchers and educators have been exploring other educational potentials of computer games. In parallel with the advancement of computer and information technology and the advocacy of constructivism in education, the issue of harnessing computer games to create new constructivist learning opportunities has received attention in both education and game research domains. This chapter is aimed at giving an introduction to computer game-based learning. Besides discussing computer games’ intrinsic educational traits favouring constructivist learning from different perspectives, the authors also review a number of instances of two recent foci in the game-based learning domain. The first one is education in games that involves the adoption of existing recreational games in the commercial market for educational use. The second is games in education that entails designing and developing educational games articulated with different constructivist learning paradigms or pedagogical approaches.

Fantasy-based learning is a kind of situated learning paradigm in which students learn by solving problems embedded in a near-real situation. Fantasy-based learning employs further interesting story plots from fantasies and/or folklores as the background situation to motivate students to participate in learning activities. It is believed that such paradigm has on one hand, the advantages of helping students to learn in an authentic situation, and on the other, the provision of interesting story episodes as a stimulating agent for less initiated students. This paper reports how a learning system based on a well-known Chinese folklore called “Tong Pak Fu and Chou Heung” was developed, and its effects on learning the statistics topic “probability” of 450 Hong Kong secondary school students when compared with 3 teacher-guided methods. Results show that the learning system is as effective as the other methods and that the students prefer using this system to learn. Consider that there was no guidance on the subject matters given to the students who learned through this system, while the others were guided by experienced teachers, the results were considered as an encouragement for further improvement and future developments to cover more topics. Authors (*: contact author) Names Affiliation Postal address Email address Phone Fax *Fong-Lok Lee The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong fllee@cuhk.edu. hk 85226096977 85226035622 Jimmy Ho-Man Lee The Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong jlee@cse.cuhk.e du.hk Tai-Shing Lau The Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of Statistics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong tslau@sparc2.sta .cuhk.edu.hk Fantasy-based Learning on the Web--Tong Pak Fu and Chou Heung: the Probabilistic Fantasy”

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) is a constructivist pedagogical approach to empower game-based learning. With near real-life simulation gaming context and teacher facilitation (scaffolding and debriefing), VISOLE aims at providing students with opportunities to acquire subject-specific knowledge in a multi-disciplinary fashion as well as sharpen their higher-order thinking skills. This paper discusses a case study carried out in Hong Kong for investigating a non-gamer student’s learning process in VISOLE. The study revealed there were a number of impeding phenomena emerged during the course of this non-gamer student’s participation in VISOLE. Nevertheless, it was found that teachers’ facilitation (the designated teacher facilitation tasks specified in VISOLE, and some new teacher interventions) was able to mitigate or overcome these impeding phenomena. The findings provided insight into the enhancement of the existing design and classroom implementation of VISOLE.

Learning Villages (LV) is a computer-supported collaborative inquiry learning (CSCIL) platform, which facilitates students' issue-based discussion in a massively multiplayer online role-play gaming (MMORPG) environment to attain the goal of argumentative knowledge construction. Regarding argumentative knowledge construction, it can be achieved only if students are able to make argumentative elaborations properly in the discussion process. This paper discusses a study of using posting templates to enhance students' argumentative elaborations in LV. Seventy-four fifth-grade students and two of their teachers from two Hong Kong elementary schools participated in this study. The results showed that the posting templates proposed in the study, to a certain extent, could empower the students to construct arguments containing reasons and grounds to rationalize and warrant their arguments. In addition to the provision of the posting templates, it was also found the students' face-to-face peer-sharing (facilitated by the teachers) could help them reach and retain a relatively higher level of attainment of argumentative elaborations in CSCIL.

This paper presents the third phase of a research project on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) involving students from 81 schools in Hong Kong and mainland China working on the topic of environmental protection. Instead of capturing an overall picture of all the participating schools, this phase of research focused on the effectiveness of knowledge building through CSCL by an in-depth investigation of the learning processes of students in two of the participating elementary schools. Scardamalia's principles of knowledge building were adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge building and 1,298 messages of online discussions posted by 153 students over six months were systematically classified, analyzed, synthesized and evaluated. Though some overseas research reported that even young children can meaningfully engage in knowledge building and benefit from the process through CSCL, this study found that the knowledge building was not as effective as expected, still students were found to have the potential of knowledge building in certain dimensions. This study recommends that teachers can provide better support for their students to facilitate them to turn their own ideas into researchable questions for investigation, improve ideas by criticizing the contributions of others, contribute to a wide variety of ideas and build up their own ideas by critically referring and comparing authoritative sources.

Folklore-based learning is a kind of situated learning paradigm in which students learn by solving problems embedded in a near-real situation. The proposed learning approach employs further interesting story plots from folklores as the background situation to motivate students to participate in learning activities. It is believed that such a paradigm has, on one hand, the advantages of helping students to learn in an authentic situation and, on the other, the provision of interesting story episodes as a stimulating agent for less initiated students. This article reports a folklore-based learning system based on the well-known Chinese folklore called “Tong Pak Fu and Chou Heung,” and its effects on learning the subject of probability by a group of 454 Hong Kong secondary school tsudents when compared with 3 teacher-guided methods. Results show that although no significant differences can be found among the different methods initially, when students with high pre-test scores were excluded the folklore-based learning group outperformed the other groups. Also, from student perception of the system it was found that the students prefer using this system to learn. Consider that no guidance on the subject matters was given to the students learning through this system, while students using the other methods were guided by experienced teachers, the results are very encouraging so that improvement and future developments to cover more topics are warranted.

Some scholars argue that simply using an educational game does not ensure that learners can generate the kinds of understandings that educators might desire. In order to maintain students' interest in playing the game and, at the same time, helps them to learn, some scholars argue that reflection and debriefing during playing was the most effective approach. In this paper, we discuss the “Record-Replay” function, which is one of the technical and educational innovations in VISOLE that enables teachers and students to replay recorded gameplays, in order to help students to re-examine their decisions made while playing the game. Teachers can also guide student in making what-if analyses, making it a good tool for reflection and debriefing. Besides, “Record-Replay” allows teachers to assess students, and researchers to study and investigate the effectiveness of the game.

Information literacy is the ability to master the processes of becoming informed. An information literacy framework should focus on the capacity of students to build both cognitive and affective knowledge. This entails the formulation of standards and indicators. Hence, we conducted a survey, for which a questionnaire was developed to allow us to understand the views of school principals and teachers on the implementation of an information literacy framework for Hong Kong students. The research findings showed that the standards and indicators we established were recognised. The practitioners agreed with us that the implementation of information literacy standards in schools was not just an issue of enforcing standards; the objective should be to build the capacity of learners and to cultivate school culture.

This article describes the design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of three synchronous distributed learning prototype systems. Each of these systems supports a particular style of interaction, referred to as a socio-activity learning model, between members of student dyads (pairs). The first two systems, Go-Working System and Working Along System, are realizations of two basic models of collaborative, one-on-one, synchronous, and networked learning, while the third one, the Hybrid System, is a combined model of the two. This work intends to identify a set of domain independent tools necessary for these models and collect information for future development through some preliminary evaluation of some experimental trials of these systems. All these systems were implemented on WWW using the computer language Java.

Fantasy-based learning is a kind of situated learning paradigm in which students learn by solving problems embedded in a near-real situation. Fantasy-based learning employs further interesting story plots from fantasies and/or folklores as the background situation to motivate students to participate in learning activities. It is believed that such paradigm has on one hand, the advantages of helping students to learn in an authentic situation, and on the other, the provision of interesting story episodes as a stimulating agent for less initiated students. This paper reports how a learning system based on a well-known Chinese folklore called "Tong Pak Fu and Chou Heung" was developed, and its effects on learning the statistics topic "probability" of 450 Hong Kong secondary school students when compared with 3 teacher-guided methods. Results show that the learning system is as effective as the other methods and that the students prefer using this system to learn. Consider that there was no guidance on the subject matters given to the students who learned through this system, while the others were guided by experienced teachers, the results were considered as an encouragement for further improvement and future developments to cover more topics.