CityU strives to promote knowledge exchange with secondary schools through organising different outreach programmes. On 4 and 22 March 2022, CLASS was happy to support the University’s initiative by delivering a theme talk in the main session and coordinating two sharing sessions for five secondary schools in total via Zoom to share their expertise and introduce some of the College’s research projects on social sciences and humanities.
Kicking off this university-wide event, the University management shared with the participating teachers information on the HKTech Tiger Programme, flexible admission arrangements and scholarships scheme, and also the BOLD@CityU initiative. Dr HUANG Guanxiong, Assistant Professor of Department of Media and Communication, was invited to deliver a theme talk titled “Combating misinformation on Social Media: Current Practices and Implications”.
After the main session, participating teachers were assigned to different sessions hosted by Colleges/Schools according to their preference and interest. Before the start of each sharing session hosted by CLASS, Dean of CLASS Professor Richard M WALKER extended a warm welcome to the teachers in the times of pandemic. He then gave the audience an overview of what humanities and social sciences are and how the College adopts different new technology in teaching and learning, as well as in conducting interdisciplinary research. On 4 March 2022, the presentation was given by Dr Dannii YEUNG, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Dr Yeung demonstrated how social scientists and psychologists conduct research by doing two real-time experiments with the teachers. Teachers learnt the concept of visual attention in an interactive way and found it inspiring. In the later part of the sharing, Dr Yeung introduced the use of the eye-tracker in psychology research studies. The application of eye-tracker and other tracking devices in the classroom setting were also shown to the teachers, in order to deepen their understanding of CityU’s facilities and equipment.
On 22 March 2022, a 45-min sharing session on the theme of digital humanities was held for another group of secondary school teachers. Dr TSUI Lik-hang, Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese and History and an expert in digital humanities, was the speaker of that day to share how the trend of big data influenced historians on conducting research with the aid of information technology tools. He cited the China Biographical Database (CBDB), a project in which he has involved since his PhD studies, as an example. CBDB is a database containing information of over 470,000 individuals in Chinese history. Apart from looking up the biographies of individual historical figures, users can also retrieve information about the social networks between groups of people and the social structure in a particular time or place in Chinese history from CBDB. The use of the database can help widen the scope of investigations, refine previous conceptions and emerge new perspectives in research studies.
Both sessions received positive feedback from the teachers. The teachers responded actively and asked questions in the Q&A sessions to further explore into the topic. For secondary schools who are interested in inviting CLASS scholars to share various liberal arts and social sciences topics with their students, the College can coordinate and arrange a series of expert talks. Details are available here. To arrange an admission or expert talk on CLASS subjects, school representatives are welcome to reach us at ch.publicity@cityu.edu.hk.
