Teaching development grants final and financial report: New media for an active and engaging reflective and experiential learning

This project aims is to adopt new media in the curriculum for experiential and reflective learning in the context of understanding the political, social, economic and cultural dynamics in Hong Kong. By asking students to apply different forms of new media such as face timing, Skype, blogging, video-recording on their projects, students will be able to understand the process of civic engagement in a pro-active and engaging manner. Students will put their projects on the department website and can also go live on the department portal for their projects. The proposed project will also provide a template to demonstrate how to use new media to promote independent self-learning and problem-solving technique. Through this project, we attempt to raise students’ awareness towards their surrounding and knowing that they are part of this society and they should care because they can. There is a growing trend in combining new media with teaching and learning. In U.S, a number of universities are already adopting new media in their teaching and learning experience. In Coursera.org, for example, there are already 62 prestigious universities collaborating with this site to offer new media learning for a novel pedagogical experience. Woodie Flowers, the MIT professor also stress that “[a] change in the basic vehicle used for learning, from archetypical courses, lectures and textbooks to interactive electronically portable media, could be the seed for position change in our entire education system” (2002:94).