Knowledge building in inter-school e-learning communities in Hong Kong: An extensional Asian model in project-based learning

The article reports on a recent online knowledge-building project involving an inter-school learning community of Roman Catholic primary schools in Hong Kong. The project used an interactive web-based learning platform called Knowledge Community (KC) and adopted a learning communities approach of advancing both individual and communal knowledge through knowledge building discourse (Collins & Bielaczyc, 1997) to develop online learning communities out of the participating students and schools. Project findings showed that students exercised improved higher-order thinking skills through interdisciplinary project learning in the key categories of the Bloom taxonomy (new knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation). As a whole, the project has illustrated an inter-school e-learning community model in East Asia extending formal schooling con-texts by bridging community involvement and ICT applications, with stresses on e-leadership, multi-party involvement in project-based learning and socio-cultural concerns in inter-school collaborative learning cultures. Copyright © 2005 James Nicholas Publishers.