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Following is the full text of the speech (English only) delivered by the Financial Secretary, Mr Antony Leung, at the BSPU/SCMP Web Design Competition Prize Presentation Ceremony today (June 9):

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is indeed my pleasure to be here today, to be present with you and to recognise the winners of this competition. We all know that the education reform has been going on for the last four years or so, and the aim of the education has been driven to encourage our students to enjoy learning a lot more, to improve their communication skills, to think independently, critically and creatively as well as to enhance their commitment to the society, the nation, as well as the world.

Through today's competition, and I have the opportunity to see the winning entries. I have to say that this competition has somehow achieved a lot of what we have been trying to push forward. I believe they enjoy the learning. At least when I talked to the students who designed the webpages, they seemed to enjoy it. And clearly as what these four MC's have said, they did enjoy the process of learning how to design the websites and I believe this is clearly what we want to achieve in education -- that they enjoy the experience of learning. They clearly have communicated well, obviously either by acting as the MC or through the website design. The two designs that I've seen have been able to communicate well, to convey a message to the audience. They are truly very creative. I'm glad that I was born many many years ago and not today because I clearly would not be able to create the webpages as good as they have done.

Some of the pages actually relate to Hong Kong, to one's society. These indeed have shown their commitment to the society. So, I am extremely pleased to see the results, that somehow have further promoted and moved along the path of the education reform.

And it's not just the ECCC (Enjoyable learning/ Effectiveness in Communication/ Creativity and critical thinking/ Commitment) that we have been talking about. I think the medium in the design of the webpage, the use of the internet, is clearly one technology that we all should be able to command and command well in going forward.

Information technology is changing the world. And hopefully through this competition, it actually promotes our students' knowledge and usage of this information technology. And I must learn from them myself how to design the website because I clearly don't know how to do it. In this age of life-long learning, we have to learn from them in the command of this technology.

All in all, this competition has been extremely successful. I salute the sponsors, the organisers, particularly the South China Morning Post together with the BSPU in organizing this, and the 16 sponsors that have come up with a lot of prizes for the winners and for the participants. Also, I would like to salute the judges, I believe there are 70 of them, who have worked very hard on 500 entries that involved 2,200 students. The sponsors, the organisers together with the judges actually contributed a lot to this competition which broadly is enriching our students' learning experience.

With all these, I congratulate the winning teams, the winning students and also I salute all the parents for allowing their children to participate in this competition because it's through all these learning experience that we clearly enrich our students' education. And it is through their excellent command of the technology, their creativity and their commitment to the society that can drive our society forward. Thank you very much.

End/Saturday, June 9, 2001

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