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The World Wide Web (WWW) documents in the
Internet have become a very popular channel of obtaining knowledge and
information. From an educator's point of view, there are some
major advantageous features of the WWW that can make it very special for
educational usage. Examples include:
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removal of the temporal
and spatial constraint of classroom teaching. |
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uncountable amount
hypermedia materials freely available on the Internet for downloading and
tailor-making. |
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enabling
the nonlinear mode of learning (through the extensive of hyperlinks) which
resembles the association operation of human mind. |
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cross-platform compatibility
for different computer operating systems. |
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anytime collaborative
learning and experience sharing could be fostered by means of the discussion
forum (or newsgroup) held on the Internet. |
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allowing almost instant
updating or revision of courseware materials. |
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plenty of user-friendly authoring tools freely
available for creating and editing multimedia home-page materials. |
At the Hong Kong Institute of Education, we have
developed an interactive hypermedia courseware on "Introductory Digital
Electronics" and made it available in the Internet (http://www.hkstar.com/~hkiedsci)
for educating our (in-service and pre-service) student teachers in the
Science subject by means of self-learning. Very positive results
have been obtained from the subsequent evaluation and the teaching and
learning quality have been enhanced/improved. Therefore, a large-scale
project called "Hypermedia And Self-learning
Centre" has been funded to develop more courseware in not only other
Science topics but also topics in Computer and Mathematics for both junior
secondary and primary school teachers.
Besides, the Science student-teachers
at HKIEd are often encouraged/required to submit their science projects
in form of the home-page format and are posted in the Intranet
for Students section of the Hypermedia
And Self-learning Centre. You can learn within an hour on how
to make use of the Netscape Communicator browser to write home-page yourself.
Click on the following hyperlink to start:
Using Netscape
Composer to develop homepage
There are some useful references on the handy tools
freely available for creating or editing home-page materials.
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