October 2011
2 posts
2 tags
University-wide Web Redesign Project
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...
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April 2011
2 posts
3 tags
From e-Learning to m-Learning
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...
December 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Wifi access across HK and beyond
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...
November 2010
8 posts
3 tags
Files in the Cloud
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...
3 tags
University Slogan Competition (for students only)
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...
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2010 eXtreme Web Designer Award
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 6th 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...
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Our New OCIO Newsletter
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...
May 2010
4 posts
4 tags
New Lightening Speed Email Server
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...
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Some recent higher education conferences in HK
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...
March 2010
4 posts
3 tags
The future of e-learning
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...
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Some Recent IT Developments @ CityU!
Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while; caught up with a lot of different tasks the past month or so. Maybe I can take this opportunity to summarize and update the CityU community on some recent IT developments at CityU.
Firstly, everyone is probably aware that MS Windows 7 is now available in all lecture theatres and classrooms. So far, it has been working fine.
We have also been...
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January 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Browsers and Security
I think everyone must have heard of the recent news that Google might pull out of the mainland of China because of attempts to hack into Google’s Gmail system. Turns out the hacking was done through a security exploit found in MS Internet Explorer. Since the code for the zero-day exploit is now public, potentially millions of Windows PCs running IE6, 7, or 8 are now at similar risks already faced...
December 2009
4 posts
3 tags
Santa Claus 2.0
Last week my kids were in town from New York City and I didn’t manage to write my weekly blog. To make up for it, this week I will write about something fun – “Santa Claus.” I’ll explore what Christmas is like in this modern Internet age of ours with all our fancy Web 2.0 technologies. Firstly, everyone already knows about Santa’s many many website that offer to write letters back to children....
2 tags
Why Not?
Two simple words - “Why Not?” - are very often the impetus of ground-breaking innovation and creativity. This week, I would like to use this blog to launch the OCIO “Why Not?” website. The website allows anyone in CityU (student/staff/alumni) to submit any idea you might have on how we can further improve our IT. The website is organized according to categories, such as admin systems, central...
November 2009
9 posts
5 tags
CityU's Modern Flippable Magazine
CityU provides, to the general public, a large collection of online documents in PDF format. These include various brochures, pamphlets, annual reports, prospectuses, etc. scattered in websites of different academic departments and administrative units. This week, I would like to introduce everyone to a newer and more modern approach to providing documents/books online using a...
2 tags
Tagging is Fun
Last week I mentioned “hashtags” and how I hope the CityU online community can help build up a momentum in using “#cityu” and “#hk” as tags in our tweets. This week, I just want to remind everyone that the ability to put tags on things is not restricted to tweets. Tags are what we computer scientists called “metadata” - data about data - a fancy way of saying...
Microblogging and Twitter
This week I would like to talk about microblogging, a modern form of communication that is popularized by Twitter. Microblogs are short messages, usually a sentence long. For Twitter, this is limited to only 140 characters. Most people are already accustomed to writing and reading short text messages, such as those sent through short message service (SMS) or instant messaging (IM). Microblogging...
CityU Blackboard User Group
Yesterday, with the help of EDO, we held our first CityU Blackboard User Group Meeting. Also present were friends from the HK Institute of Education as well as representatives from Blackboard and their local reseller BEENET. We heard talks from Dr. Hebe Wong on using a comment bank to give suggestions on English writing improvements and grading English with rubrics. Delegates from...
Cha Siu Bao 叉燒包
For the past 4 years, I’ve been organizing an annual CityU competition called the “eXtreme Web Designer Award” contest, nicknamed the “CityU Web Hacker” contest. This year is our 5th year. It is also a very special year because I invited students from other Universities to join as well as the Hong Kong Computer Society to sponsor the event. Each year we have a different...
1 tag
October 2009
6 posts
2 tags
Green IT: Saving Trees
Last week I mentioned that students’ printing at CSC kills roughly 2 trees a week. I did not factor in all the printing that is done by the academic departments and administrative units. This can easily amount to a dozen large trees destroyed each week. The sad thing is that a vast majority of what is printed might be thrown out soon after a few weeks or even immediately after a meeting. But this...
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The CityU Community Bulletin Board
This week I would like to share some personal thoughts on our email broadcasting system (EBS). Our current system has been serving us for close to a decade now. Originally, it was designed as a quick and easy tool for departments and units to broadcast important and critical messages to a wide audience, such as the entire department or even the entire University population. Probably because of its...
1 tag
Let's Make Our Internet/Intranet Even Better
This is my second weekly blog post. This week, I would like to share some ideas and thoughts on strategies to help make our CityU website even more effective and useful. These are just my initial thoughts, please feel free to comment; I would love to hear from others in the greater CityU community. This week I would like to talk about our CityU website. Our website is our window to the world. It...
2 tags
Thoughts on Our ICT Priorities
Although I have been in transition for over a month, last Friday was my official first day as the CIO for CityU. In this blog, I would like to share with the greater CityU community - teachers, students, staffs, alumni and friends, some of my thoughts on our current ICT needs and priorities. By sharing, I hope we can all work together to create an even better CityU by leveraging ICT for teaching,...
September 2009
1 post
Welcome to my blog!
This blog is mainly for students, teachers, staffs, alumni and friends of the City University of Hong Kong. I plan to write about general ICT issues for higher education. In addition, I have a facebook page that I will use to interact with the greater CityU community. I also have a twitter page that summarizes both this blog and my facebook interactions as well as contain my daily status...