KE Stories - About KE - HKU Knowledge Exchange

Learning Right from Wrong in the Business World

Business ethics has become a hot topic of late thanks to corporate misbehaviour and the global financial crisis. But in today's packed curriculum, how can the complex ethical issues involved be conveyed to the next generation of business leaders?

Education in the Community

To ask the Faculty of Education about its knowledge exchange programme is to ask it about its entire body of work. The Faculty by its very nature requires a high degree of knowledge exchange in order to be able to place students in schools for teaching practice and identify and test research that is pertinent to education.

FICPI South East Asian Drafting (SEAD) Training Course

A patent application starts with drafting a claim submission. It requires not only knowledge of the invention, but also good language skills and legal knowledge. The Fédération Internationale des Conseils en Propriété Industrielle (FICPI; 'International Federation of Intellectual Property Attorneys' in English) has developed a training course on drafting patent specifications, which was launched in Singapore in 1997 and extended to Australia and Europe in 1999.

Bridging Past and Present

A collapsed village bridge may seem like a straightforward repair job, but for the Department of Architecture it turned out to be a great opportunity to engage with a community in re-creating public space.

Before It's Too Late: The Witness to War Project

Hong Kong experienced terrible upheaval in the Second World War but personal accounts of these experiences and the painful choices they involved have been scant. HKU has been working to change that in a unique collaboration with local secondary schools.

Language as Culture

Should language be taught simply as a tool to communicate, or can it be a starting point for deeper cultural explorations? This is a question that concerned the School of Chinese when it saw the government launch the Chinese language curriculum in 2000.

Moving Up the Wage Scale

Hong Kong's economy has undergone a lot of changes over the past 30 years, evolving from a manufacturing city into a global financial centre. How has that affected people's earnings? Are they better off? And what about the people on the lowest rungs of the wage ladder?

Something to Chew On

Tooth decay is an unpleasant experience that we all want to avoid and the Faculty of Dentistry has been educating young people in schools for years on how to do so. But tooth decay is also something else: an example of science in our everyday lives.

Out of the Shadows

Private supplementary tutoring has become ubiquitous in Hong Kong, and is increasingly visible elsewhere. It is widely called "shadow education" because it mimics regular schools. As the curriculum in the schools changes, so it changes in the shadow. The intention may be to help students keep up or get ahead, but shadow education has implications for education systems as a whole – and for social equity.