'vChina': a project on learning in a video-conferencing environment in distance education

Lam Ho-Pun
University of Queensland
Australia

Lau Wai-mei, Leung Kam-chung
St. Bonaventure College and High School
Hong Kong

The use of informatin technology is now an integral part of primary and secondary school education around the world and is maturing with increased usage. During the past decade, as the price of technology has fallen, there has been a growing awareness of the value of integrating various low-end communication technologies with new applications to support collaborative learning. One such extensively used technology is the Video-Conferencing Learning Environment (VCLE) that was developed to support interactive distance education. This paper reports on the experience of video-conferencing at school level in Hong Kong and China and, based on our observations, discusses some of its technical and pedagogical implications.