Usability Test of eHealth Promotion @HKIEd—A Community of Practice Platform to Promote Healthy Lifestyles

Community of Practice (CoP) has been proved as an effective means for co-creation of knowledge. It is not yet widely used in health promotion, not to mention to utilize technological environment such as Web 2.0 to add value to the CoP. Under this study, an eHealth promotion @HKIEd, a CoP platform to promote healthy lifestyles was designed and constructed. It helped facilitate the CoP to share useful health information, locate expertise, promote health related events, communicate health updates effectively, co-construct shared repertoire of knowledge and build shared best practice on effective health promotion which was not limited to time, space and distance. Usability test was conducted to evaluate user acceptance of the eHealth promotion CoP platform using the Computer System Usability Questionnaire. A random sample of eighty-three active participants was recruited. Fifty females and thirty-three males with mean (S.D.) aged 21.1 were asked to evaluate the e-platform. The average scores of each domain were calculated with the corresponding means of the average scores of System Use, Information Quality and Interface Quality being 2.69, 2.83 and 2.74 respectively. The overall usability was 2.48 and the eHealth promotion @HKIEd demonstrated a high usability. It will provide a promising way to disseminate information for the public in health awareness promotion.

Community of Practice as an Epistemological Concept

Community of practice as a social learning theory is not easy to understand.Existing literature concerning the application of this theory into the educational field mostly interprets it as a methodological rather than an epistemological one,or even misread it.Enhance,the production of this paper,aiming at an explication of community of practice as an epistemological concept.By explicating its definition,three dimensions,three belongings and the four features of it,the paper endeavors to enable readers to better understand this elusive concept.

SDI planning using the system dynamics technique within a community of practice:lessons learnt from Tanzania

There exist major challenges in accelerating the spatial data infrastructure(SDI)planning process in the developing countries as well as advocating for politicians to support the development of SDI,due to the high complexity of SDI,lack of knowledge and experience,and limited insight in the benefits.To address these challenges,a methodology for SDI planning in Tanzania,based on the system dynamics technique and the communities of practice concept,was adopted and applied within a community consisting of experts from stakeholder organizations.The groups gathered to develop an SDI plan,while they shared their knowledge and discussed their ideas that helped their understanding of SDI.By running the system dynamics model,the development of SDI over time could be simulated that gave the planning community an insight about the future effects of today’s plans and decisions.Finally,an optimum model could be developed by refinements and improvements done with the consensus of the SDI stakeholders.This model included the components and policies that are essential for a successful SDI implementation in Tanzania and can be used as a basis for SDI planning and help to gain political support.Lessons learnt from this research were promising regarding the usability of the methodology for SDI planning in comparable countries.

The Promise and Dilemma of the Mediated Parent-Teacher Relationship in the Age of Social Networking Sites

Based on an ethnographic study on two cohorts of teachers and parents in China,this article reveals that social networking sites(SNS)have widened the channel for parents and teachers to establish and maintain a relationship,and has formed an online“community of practice”to promote such collaborations.Yet,this could be accomplished only at the expense of teachers’professional and personal boundaries becoming increasingly blurred,which has emerged as a potential risk for their professionalism.Moreover,such a“community of practice”has also opened up a new space for winning or losing at the educational game for parents from different background,which has inadvertently led to widening the arena for the operation of old mechanisms of social inequality.This study suggests that further investigation should be conducted to examine the potential of SNS in the parent−teacher relationship.

“The Monkey King Meets the Spiderman”:Narrative Inquiry into Chinese Students’Academic Socialization Experiences in a U.S.University

This narrative study explores four Chinese students’academic socialization experiences in one research-intensive public university in the US.By drawing upon Wenger’s(1998)communities of practice and Gee’s(2000)theorizing on identity as the synthesized theoretical framework,this research uncovers four Chinese students’academic socialization stories nestled in the shifting cross-cultural landscape.Meanwhile,this study reveals that the Chinese students’academic socialization intersects a matrix of factors,which can be categorized into“personal landscape”and“professional landscape.”Last,this narrative case study concluded that the Chinese students’academic socialization involves the continuous negotiations of their multiple identities embedded in the cross-cultural contexts.