CIO's Blog

University-wide Web Redesign Project

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:34:58 +0800

The CityU website redesign project is probably the largest Web project the University has undertaken since its establishment. It benefits all central and departmental websites, covering close to a hundred sub-sites and hundreds of thousands of web pages. It is the result of the collaboration of over a hundred IT and non-IT staff across all departments and units. The project is part of our continued effort in improving online user experience, user friendliness and accessibility as well as search engine optimization; strengthening our online branding and providing a consistent look-and-feel throughout all our websites. Using the latest Web technology, the new websites support modern mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets.

CityU’s new homepage design

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:33:08 +0800

CityU’s new homepage design

From e-Learning to m-Learning

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:23:12 +0800

In support of our new “Discover & Innovate” initiative to provide a technology-rich environment to foster discovery and innovation in student learning, the University is upgrading our e-learning technology suite with numerous new additions. The first addition is providing mobile learning capabilities for our Blackboard-based learning management system. The City University of Hong Kong is now the first university in the Greater China region to use Bb Mobile Learn! This mobile app allows smart phone access to CityU’s Blackboard platform and supports iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and BlackBerry. Users’ guide can be found at http://go.cityu.hk/xy45ot for teachers and http://go.cityu.hk/bg6nnj for students. In addition, to engage students in class through surveys, informal quizzes, and questionnaires, we have piloted a subscription to Qualtrics hosted cloud service. Teachers can use this tool to gauge student learning. Totally user-friendly, teachers can easily create questionnaires without prior training. For more information, contact our e-Learning Team (elearn@cityu.edu.hk).

Blackboard Mobile Learn on iPad

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:20:17 +0800

Blackboard Mobile Learn on iPad

Wifi access across HK and beyond

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:18:24 +0800

Many CityU students/staff might not be aware that we have access to thousands of wifi points across Hong Kong. For example, we have access to 8,000 PCCW wi-fi hotspots, as well as 3,000 y5zone hotspots across Hong Kong. These hotspots are usually located at MTR stations, restaurants, malls, convenience stores, coffee shops, etc. Just use your CityU email to login and connect to either “Universities via PCCW” or “Universities via Y5ZONE”. In addition, if you are visiting other universities overseas, we have access to wifi provided by eduroam. You can get more information on how to login at the CSC wlan website.

photo of Jay De Boer’s kids...

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:07:11 +0800

photo of Jay De Boer’s kids from http://home.comcast.net/~jay.deboer/wardriving/

Files in the Cloud

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 12:26:19 +0800

It is common for students to use USBs to store their homework so that they have access to them at school. Unfortunately, USBs are very easy to lose. This can be devastating if the USB contains the only copy of your work or data. If your files don’t contain really sensitive personal data, such as banking data, you might consider using these new “files in the cloud” services instead of USBs and save your temporary working documents in the cloud. Many companies offer free versions of the services with limited storage, say 1GB to 2 GB free. For example, there is dropbox, syncplicity, sugarsync, and google upload. No more nightmares about losing your USBs!

photo credit (cc) BinaryApe

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 12:12:38 +0800

photo credit (cc) BinaryApe

University Slogan Competition (for students only)

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:55:00 +0800

CityU has a new theme: Discover and Innovate @ CityU - promoting original discovery and innovation among students.

The University Slogan competition is to come up with a new slogan to go with the new theme. Winning slogans will be used for CityU’s publicity purposes. All full-time and part-time CityU undergraduate and postgraduates are eligible to participate.

The overall winner will receive an iPad; the 1st Runner-up, an iPod Touch; and the 2nd Runner-up, a 1TB external hard drive. The next two finalists will receive a set of Sony headphones each.

Participants may submit more than one slogan, either in English, Chinese or in both. Entries should be sent to CPRO (cpro@cityu.edu.hk) on or before 30 November. Each entry should include a brief note (approximately 100 words) explaining the idea behind the slogan. Please write “Slogan Competition” in the subject line of the email and include your name, student ID number and mobile phone number in the body of the message.

Good Luck!

(c) 2010 City University of Hong Kong

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:50:00 +0800

2010 eXtreme Web Designer Award

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:30:24 +0800

It is time for the annual “eXtreme Web Designer Award” contest that I co-organize with the Hong Kong Computer Society and other Universities in Hong Kong. This is our 6^th year. This year is special as we started to invite Universities outside of HK to join as well. Each year we have a different theme; this year it is “sustainable campus.”

The main objective of the competition is simple - to encourage students to learn and use professional Web development techniques through a fun competition. Key themes we like to promote includes use of Web standards, accessibility, usability, and search engine optimization.

If you are a student, please join, or encourage others to join. Deadline is 10^thDecember.

Here are some photos from last year’s award presentation ceremony at the HK Computer Society’s annual New Year party.

(c) City University of Hong Kong

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:22:47 +0800

Our New OCIO Newsletter

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 10:18:41 +0800

It’s been a while since I blogged; so much has happened in the past few months. We have been busy aligning all our enterprise systems for the launch of new 334 academic reform in 2012 as well as procuring new systems to support this change. To keep the entire University up-to-date on all these IT developments, we began to produce a quarterly OCIO Newsletter.

In this issue, we highlighted some of the IT work we are doing for 334, our re-launched student computer literacy training, business continuity plans, email server technology upgrade, collaboration services from Google/MS and the new Google intranet search.

Photo

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 10:12:56 +0800

New Lightening Speed Email Server

Thu, 27 May 2010 13:44:12 +0800

For the past few months, CityU had been bombarded with an increased number of spam email. Out of the hundreds of thousands of emails our servers process each day, sometimes over 90% are spam. (In Asia Pacific, roughly 91.8% of all emails are spam.) Only a few percent of our incoming email are actually useful. This has caused our email servers to be quite overworked in filtering out what is real email and what is spam. In the worst case, you may have noticed a several hour delay before your email gets to its final destination. As of early this week, thanks to our Computer Services Centre (CSC), we have installed a brand new high-powered email server, running a collection of newer state-of-the-art anti-spam technologies, that include IP blocking, IP reputation, advanced keyword analysis, etc. The result is a greatly noticeable improvement in processing speed. Your email should now get to its destination within seconds!

By the way, I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that there is an additional “Junk Mail Filter” option that you can select if you would like a “stronger” spam filter. You can set your filter option by clicking “Account Management” and then “Setup Junk Mail Filter” in our email portal.

photo by Bruno Girin

Thu, 27 May 2010 13:27:02 +0800

photo by Bruno Girin

Some recent higher education conferences in HK

Tue, 25 May 2010 16:02:54 +0800

The past month, being the end of a semester, must have been quite busy for everyone at CityU, particularly the students. In this blog, I would like to share some information on three very useful higher education seminars/conferences that I attended in the past few weeks.

On 3 May, Lingnan University held a “Sharing Session on Academic Advising” hosted by Prof. William Lee, Associate Vice-President (Academic Affairs). The sharing highlighted the importance of academic advising to support the new 3+3+4 curriculum structure as well as Lingnan’s experience in implementing a new academic advising and degree audit software application called DegreeWorks, which works with the Banner student information system. Besides Lingnan, the HK Institute of Education and CityU are also implementing DegreeWorks to support 3+3+4. The three institutes are part of the “Project 4Y” collaborative project funded by the UGC Restructuring and Collaboration Fund. Academic advising is particularly important for 3+3+4 because of the flexibility built into the curriculum, such as college-based admissions, general education, and the possibilities of major/minor as well as double major or double minors. With all these choices, students will need some guidance on how to select courses and how to plan their 4 years of studies. These study plans are crucial tools in helping us allocate/plan teaching resources and timetabling.

Then on 10 May, a “P4Y Forum on Institutional Planning” was held at the HK Institute of Education. This was organized by Mr. Carroll Poon, Acting Head of Information Systems Office, on behalf of the “Project 4Y” committee. The conference focused on the role of institutional planning; in particular how it might support 3+3+4, as well as the role of business intelligence (BI) technology in this. The keynote speaker was Prof. Nicholas de Takacsy, Emeritus Professor at McGill, who shared with us his long history of experience in these areas. Nick reminded us that it is not really about BI technology per sec, but about what an institute really hopes to achieve with institutional planning. A range of technologies can be used, such as data warehousing, data mining, analytics, dashboards, drill-downs, etc.

And just last week, on 19-20 May, the Joint Universities Computer Centre (JUCC), of which CityU is a member, held it’s first Information Security Conference, titled “Information Security Challenge in Today’s Higher Education Community.” The conference invited quite a few prominent keynote speakers, including Mr. Jeremy Godfrey, CIO for the HK Government. Colleagues from all the JUCC Universities as well as associated Universities were present. The conference covered a wide range of important and up-to-date IT security topics and was very well attended.

Me giving the Opening Speech at the P4Y Forum on Institutional...

Tue, 25 May 2010 16:00:47 +0800

Me giving the Opening Speech at the P4Y Forum on Institutional Planning.

The future of e-learning

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:15:00 +0800

If you are interested in e-learning and how technology can be used. Two recent reports gives us a glimpse of future technology trends and strategies for e-learning. The first report is the 2010 Horizon Report [pdf] created by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium. Each year, the Horizon Report identifies 6 emerging technologies or practices that might make an impact on e-learning within the next 1 to 5 years. The technologies identified in the 2010 report are: mobile computing, open content, electronic books, simple augmented reality, gesture-based computing, and visual data analysis. In addition, it listed several key trends in e-learning: abundance of free resources via Internet - our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing; work, learn, and study whenever/wherever; increasingly cloud-based; and learning is more collaborative, and multi-disciplinary in nature.

The second important report is the 2010 National Education Technology Plan (draft) issued by the US Department of Education. In this 80 page document, it outlines the United States’ vision of 21st century model of learning - powered by technology. The document mentions using technology to create “engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners…” with an emphasis on “all” and computer accessibility. It also suggests “leveraging technology to provide personalized learning not one-size-fits all curriculum…” The future will “replace solo practitioners…” with multiple educators providing guidance and advice to students. Learning will no longer in just inside the classroom. There is a concept of “always on” learning. To support this learning resources and online communities must be available for both educators and students. In terms of technology, the plan mentions open education resources (such as the Open CourseWare Consortium), software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, open source technologies, and mobile devices.

At CityU, I would like us to promote an “openness” in our e-learning environment. Although we centralize on BlackBoard (Bb) as our e-learning platform, we do encourage our teachers to explore additional learning tools to create a blended learning environment that is most suited for your specific pedagogy needs. For example, some teachers supplement Bb with Ning social network, wikis/blogs, SlideShare, Moodle, etc. Our CityU Bb implementation now provides BuildingBlocks to connect your students to Google Apps, iPhone, Facebook, etc. allowing them access to course information via different channels and provide new modes of collaboration to support “always on” - anywhere and anytime - learning.

Photo

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:44:44 +0800