Campus TV and the development of important thinking skills

Vincent H K Hung
Hong Kong Institute of Education
Hong Kong SAR, China
Allan H K Yuen
University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China

It has been suggested that students can learn with video technology (Jonassen, Howland, Moore and Marra 2003): by involving them in project-based production, they will engage in deep learning and develop a variety of thinking skills in order to complete the project (Jonassen, Carr and Yueh 1998). With the shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based society, the development of skills in, for example, problem solving, project management, collaboration, leadership and presentation is essential (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000).

For the past few years, many Hong Kong primary schools have been supported by the Quality Education Fund to set up Campus TV within or beyond the curriculum. Campus TV activities may provide a platform for engaging students in video production to develop important thinking skills -- though the possibility of using such a platform for this purpose is still under development. Last summer, a three-day summer Digital Video (DV) Camp was held in a local primary school, with about 20 Primary 4 and 5 pupils producing their own topics on digital video. Participant observation and semi-structured and focus group interviews were held to find out what the students had learned during the collaborative production process. Through digital ethnography methodology (Goodman 1998), the students demonstrated unexpected creativity, showed proficiency in using technology and media language to express themselves, and explicitly expressed the importance of collaborative skills in the process of video production. These encouraging findings suggest a direction for the implementation of Campus TV for student learning and the development of important thinking skills in the Hong Kong primary school setting.