Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education

CITE Research Symposium 2015
Call for Contributions

CITE Research Symposium 2015 (CITERS 2015) will be held on 29-30 May 2015 (Friday & Saturday) at The University of Hong Kong. CITERS 2015 is organized by the Centre for Information Technology in Education of the University of Hong Kong in collaboration with the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education (CAISE), Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), the Libraries of the University of Hong Kong, and HKU SPACE Centre for Cyber Learning. The symposium’s main theme is:

Digital generation is one of many labels coined to describe individuals born in years following the advent of the personal computer and the Internet. Many scholars have argued that since the digital generation has been exposed to various forms of technologies from young, and is frequently immersed in a networked world of digital tools, they have different learning preferences, are capable of multitasking, and have different ways of information sense making. What exactly are these learning preferences? Does being connected digitally mean that people are learning? How we can meaningfully connect digital learners to their peers, teachers, and communities? How can we support the development of a learning society for the digital generation? It can be argued that given the rapid advances in technology, the digital world that young people grow up in are very different even within a matter of several years. Would it be more meaningful to refer to them as digital generations? What needs to be done to help the digital generations become constructive and responsible members of a learning society and avoid the dark side of the cyberworld?

This conference aims to investigate these questions. Specifically, the following sub-themes will be explored:

• Cyber worldness and Cyber worldliness. Topics include but not limited to young people’s use and experiences of the Internet, keeping learners healthy, safe and productively engaged as collaborative knowledge builders on the Internet.
• Designing and assessing learning. Topics include but not limited to learning and assessment designs, learning analytics and visualizations to provide a ubiquitous and informative learning environment to help learners, teachers and parents set appropriate learning goals, monitor learning progress and revise learning pathways so that learners can achieve their desired academic, cognitive, social, and emotional learning outcome goals.
• The future of open learning. Topics include but not limited to the use of open Educational Resources (OER), the impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on students’ learning and on educational institutions, the sustainability and accreditation of open learning.
• Emerging pedagogies and technologies. Topics include but not limited to games for learning at scale, gamification, fablabs, location and context aware technology, wearable technology, automated feedback and grading tools.

The CITERS 2015 Organizing Committee is now calling for contributions from educational researchers and practitioners, including teacher educators, principals, teachers, government officers, librarians, students and graduates from education programmes, CITE members and those interested in IT and educational research. More details about CITERS 2015 call for contribution can be found in http://citers2015.cite.hku.hk/call-for-contributions/

Five presentation formats will be accepted, namely:

• Symposia (group of presentations on a theme)
• Paper Presentations
• Virtual Paper Presentations
• Workshops
• Teacher and student Demonstrations

Submitted contributions will be reviewed by the CITERS 2015 Organizing Committee and Program Committee. Full papers (optional) submitted will have a chance to be published in the ITEC e-Journal. Regarding the instructions for preparing the full papers, please kindly refer to URL http://ejournal.cite.hku.hk/ for details.

Submission
Please submit proposals via our conference system at CITE Open Conference System on or before 27 February 2015 (Fri). We are preparing the submission system and details will be announced soon.

Enquiries
Please send your enquiries to citers-info@cite.hku.hk if you have any questions about the event or visit http://citers2015.cite.hku.hk/ for the details.

I look forward to your active participation.

Best Regards,
Dr. Jingyan Lu & Dr. Timothy Hew
CITERS 2015 Organizing Committee co-chairs