Hopefully this will be the last issue of Porcupine! penned from our temporary accommodation. There is no exact date fixed yet, but it will be before the end of 1999. It will be good to have our "own place" instead of being fragmented across the campus and communication should be much easier and hopefully better. We will occupy the whole of the third floor and most of the second floor in the Kadoorie Biological Sciences Building, our fellow occupants being Botany, Zoology and the Institute of Molecular Biology. The facilities will be a great improvement on what we have now, especially for postgraduate students! We are all grateful to Lady Kadoorie and the Kadoorie Charitable Foundation for such a magnificent gift.
Meanwhile another academic year has begun and our first "crop" of students to enter the new M.Phil. degree programme are launched into what I understand to be a significant work-load of course requirements. The coursework represents about 25% of their 2 year degree and so is a sizeable component anyway. However, given that much of it is front-loaded, presumably the load might appear to be somewhat greater!
To end on a less exciting theme, I want to remind you all at the start of this academic year that attendance at seminars is part of your programme and that you are expected to give a seminar at least once during your minimum period but preferably twice - one near the beginning, one near the end. Your support for this seminar series, and your participation in it, are essential to its success in its present form.
John Hodgkiss
Head of DepartmentVirtual School of Biodiversity an update
Well it's official — the Virtual School of Biodiversity is a reality. After a year's pilot project the Department of Ecology & Biodiversity, The University of Hong Kong and The School of Biological Sciences at Nottingham University have secured a $5.2M grant from the UGC and HKU to develop the Virtual School concept over the next three years. This means that the start of development of multimedia educational material made last year can now continue. To date courseware on The Algae, The Fungi and Fishes have been used by undergraduates, together with the VSB web site (http://vsb.nott.ac.uk/vsb).
Student reaction was very positive with ~87 % of students downloading the material and visiting the web site. Average scores of 6.7 and 7.9 were registered on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest score!) in reply to the questions did you benefit from the CD and would you like to see more material available on CD? Clearly students at HKU, as at Nottingham, appreciate, enjoy and want an increased variety of teaching styles which the CD helps provide.
With the advent of the three year project there are now a greater variety of courses being planned (e.g. Plants, The Virtual Stream, Rocky shore sampling, Molecular Ecology), as well as diversification and localisation of some previously existing courses (e.g. Biomes, What is Biodiversity? How humans evolved) as well as a series of web-based student resource centres for undergraduate courses. We are also trying to encourage links with other Universitas 21 members such as the National University of Singapore, Peking University and British Columbia and exploring the opportunity to develop a branch of the VSB which could interact with local secondary schools.
To promote the concept of the Virtual School, Dr Peter Davies, the project Director, presented an invited paper at the Fifth Hong Kong Web Symposium on October 4th 1999 at the Wang Gungwu Lecture Hall, HKU (the paper is available at http://ibis.nott.ac.uk/vsb/papers/hk_conf99.html).
If anyone wants to know more, or get involved, please contact Gray Williams on hrsbwga@hkucc.hku.hk
G. A. Williams
P.2
Back to Contents
Back to Porcupine Homepage
Go to Department Homepage