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No. 54 19 December 2005
 

 

Search Committee for a new president
The Executive Committee of the University Council will meet in early January to establish the Search Committee for a new president of City University of Hong Kong. The Search Committee, to be chaired by the Chairman of the Council, will comprise the council Chairman, three other members of the Executive committee and three members of the Senate.

Professor H K Chang, University President, has announced that he will retire in May 2007, by which time he will have served CityU for 11 years. He informed the Executive Committee in June this year that he intended to retire when his contract expires on 30 April 2007. At the Council meeting held on 28 November, Professor Chang urged Council members to form a Search Committee as quickly as possible.

 

Outcomes Based Teaching and Learning
As part of its plan to implement Outcomes Based Teaching and Learning (OBTL) in all academic programmes, the University will hold a series of 16 workshops from 16 January to 2 March. These sessions address the central issue of how to implement OBTL at CityU. A team of international consultants will facilitate discussions on designing teaching and learning activities (TLAs) to align with intended learning outcomes (ILOs); theories on assessing ILOs; designing assessment methods to align with ILOs; providing constructive feedback; assessing ILOs in large classes; and many more. Professor John Biggs, an expert in constructive alignment and the principal consultant on the OBTL project, will give a plenary session on 11 January. His talk will focus on designing TLAs and assessment to align with course ILOs. The plenary has been organized by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education and the Quality Assurance Committee.

 

Super eBook Consortium
The University, together with Feng Chia University and National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, spearheaded the launch of the "Super eBook Consortium" on 14 December 2005. The Consortium, a group of 48 university libraries in Hong Kong and Taiwan, is partnering up with the world's largest ebook provider, the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), to establish the "Super eBook Collection". Offering over 50,000 volumes of ebooks, the consortium's ebook collection is the largest and the most comprehensive of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

Avian Flu and campus arrangements
The Ad-hoc Group on Prevention of Avian Flu (Ad-hoc Group) has outlined arrangements for examinations and the student residences in the event of an outbreak of avian flu. This move falls in line with the Government's three-level response system to the health threat and affects University examinations, which end 24 December. The University has activated the 'alert' level of its response system which means students are advised to wear face masks during exams if their temperature exceeds 38¢XC or if they have any symptoms of influenza. Please visit the University's avian flu website at www.cityu.edu.hk/avianflu/ for more details.

 

Risk Management
The Risk Management Committee has received a report from the University of Melbourne team that visited CityU in October to share its experiences of risk management. The report details the team's recommendations on risk management. The Committee held a brief preliminary meeting to discuss the report and will forward it to the Chairman of the Management Board, Professor H K Chang, University President. CityU takes the issue of risk management seriously and is keen to learn from teams at other universities to ensure CityU continues to thrive as a centre of excellence. The team from Melbourne was invited by the Committee, which was appointed by the President in response to a proposal from the Audit Committee in April this year that the MB introduced a risk management policy and associated mechanisms to identify and monitor risks.

 

Kudos
Professor (Chair) S T Lee, Department of Physics and Materials Science, has been named an Academician of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for his outstanding contributions to the fields of nanomaterials and nanoscience, nanodiamond and thin film technology, and organic electroluminscence.

 

International film award
An MFA graduate from the School of Creative Media, Sheetal Agarwal, won the Best Documentary KODAK Award at the 20th Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival Student Competition in the US in November with Ordinary Lives. Her award-winning film highlights the social, cultural and political issues that affect the lives a family of ten living in a slum in Mumbai. It was screened at the Golden Lion International Film Festival in October in Swaziland and will be screened at this month's India International Women's Film Festival and the Delray Beach Film Festival in Florida in March 2006.

 

Best paper awards
Professor Liu Zhiqiang of the School of Creative Media and the School's first PhD graduate, Dr S C Zhang, won the Best Paper Award at the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Visual Information Processing (VIP '05) which was held at CityU, 12 December. The workshop was co-sponsored by IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society; the University of Sydney and CityU.

Li Pei, a PhD student in the Department of Electronic Engineering, has won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2005 Asia Pacific Microwave Conference (APMC 2005) in Suzhou, 4¡V7 December. His paper was on "Novel Wideband Dual-frequency Patch Antenna Array for Dual-polarization Operation". It was one of four best student papers selected from 309 students of 40 countries.

 

International conference
Professor (Chair) Eden Yu, Head of the Department of Economics and Finance, will be a keynote speaker at an international conference entitled "Open political-economic systems: globalization and institutional change" in Beijing, 21¡V22 December, organized by Waseda University of Japan and Renmin University of China.

 

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