Press Release

 

 

Speech by the Secretary for Education and Manpower

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Following is a speech (English only) by the Secretary for Education and Manpower, Mr Joseph W P Wong, at the AT & T Virtual Classroom Contest today (Tuesday):

Ms Patrick-Ezzell, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, fellow students,

I am pleased to attend the Third AT&T Virtual Classroom Contest 98 Awards Ceremony which is held for the first time in Hong Kong. First of all, I congratulate the 18 grand prize winners who have come to Hong Kong from different countries on their success in the contest. Some of you must be very excited to meet your 'virtual classmates' in person today for the first time, classmates with whom you have worked so intensively through the net during the past few months, from setting a theme for the web-site to gathering information and designing the layout.

I compliment AT&T on their initiative and efforts in organising this event. The Virtual Classroom interactive learning programme corroborates the borderless realm of the world of the Internet, which transcends geographical and cultural barriers and brings people much closer together than ever before. Clicking the mouse enables us to access the universe of information and knowledge. But information technology is not just about information and technology. It is also about people, making use of the information and technology, and working together as partners across mountains and oceans, thousands of miles apart.

The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is committed to promoting information technology in education so that our young people can grow up with the knowledge, the skills and the vision to play an active part in the next century of information and technology.

To turn our vision into reality, we announced a five-year strategy entitled "Information Technology for Learning in a New Era" last November. The four key components of our strategy are to enhance our students' access to information technology (IT) and the Internet, to provide training and support for all teachers, to use IT to support teaching in the school curriculum, and to foster a community-wide culture which helps promote IT in education. We have set aside a capital sum of HK$3 billion and will spend an annual amount of HK$560 million to implement the various initiatives in our strategy.

Specifically on connectivity, all of our primary and secondary schools have access to the Internet. We will link up the library, staff rooms and computer rooms of schools by a Local Area Network. We have also commissioned a consultancy study on the establishment of a territory-wide education-specific intranet.

Apart from providing all schools with the basic facilities, we encourage individual schools to move faster in learning through IT if they are more ready and willing. The Quality Education Fund, which the Government set up with a capital injection of HK$5 billion, is being used to finance more advanced school-based IT projects. The Fund has also financed a project named "Hong Kong Cyber Campus" which is initiated by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and connects some 400 primary and secondary schools to a school intranet system, providing free dial-up lines for about 17,000 teachers and free e-mail accounts for 230,000 students. The project will be shortly expanded to cover another 250 schools, their teachers and students.

It is my firm belief that while the Government should demonstrate its commitment and provide the necessary resources to promote IT in education, this is not enough. The whole community, in particular, the principals and teachers of the schools, the parents, and the business sector must join hands in this important endeavour. This is why I am pleased to see companies like AT&T playing an active part in this educational process. I hope to see more business participation in IT education.

Thank you.

End/Tuesday, May 18, 1999

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