A Possible Research Topic

As the mobile learning is become more and more popular in modern education, students are able to grab a piece of information so quickly through their iPhone/iPad or any other Internet-connected digital devises, do they still bother to make efforts to remember something?
At “ancient times”, we used pens and paper notebooks to record what teachers were taught in classes, when writing took place, to some extent, it helped students to take the first step in remembering the contents; when they reviews the class, things written on notebook could remind the learning contents again and they may think more deeper, then they might add more notes on. It’s better to understand the whole thing and remember what you have learned now, otherwise, it would be a huge task before the exam when you basically need to start from zero.
According to cognitive theory, two things are very important:
(1) The memory system is an active organized processor of information and
(2) Prior knowledge plays an important role in learning.
If students are so easy to get the information from Internet through their mobile devices, they may feel there is not a necessity to remember everything, since their mobiles made it possible for information-on-demand (or knowledge-on-demand). However, one’s knowledge is expended based on what they have now (what they remember), if you don’t have the previous knowledge base, you cannot absorb new knowledge. It can be explained that why we have prerequisites for different courses.
So what I feel will be an interesting research topic is that “Will the use of Internet – connected mobile devices weaken the memory ability for students?”
To conduct a research, a comparative experiment can be conducted. For one group of students, they are allowed to use iPhone/iPad during the class, and for the other group, they can only use pens and paper during the class. We can ask them to have a quiz right after class to see what happen to their short-term memory, and of course, we can also wait until the end of semester to see which group did better job in the exam.
Still, I think the result might be different when conduct experiment in primary school, secondary school and in the university. But I may have the hypothesis that it matters more in primary level.

Usage of open source software for schools: A case study in Hong Kong

Define	The education software is rarely and expensive in Hong Kong. The free online application is not stable. Thus, we try to find out the possibility of using open source software in Hong Kong Secondary School.
Plan	Literature review: Mobbs, R; Hawkridge, D.(2010). Utilizing open source tools for online teaching and learning. British Journal of Educational Technology. 41(3).58-65. Chan, Man-hoi.(2004). Utilizing open source software in schools of Hong Kong. Master thesis. The University of Hong Kong. http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/31384 DiBone, C., Ockman, S.,& Stone, M.(1999) Open Sources. Sebastopol:O’Reilly.
Execute research procedures	quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, including satisfaction surveys, qualitative content analysis of online discussions, and unstructured interviews

The Golden Ratio of IT investment in system providing to training - A Potential Research Topic

I have observed that there are a huge different between the IT investment in hareware, software and training. This situation lead to inefficiency of using Information Technology. For example, IT department buy a lot of hareware and software that the teachers and students seldom used; the teachers have no idea what they can choos; even some simply technology that the teachers require most are never introducted.

I believe that there is a "golden ratio" of IT investment in system providing to training which is most effectiveness to education, and it's worth to find the ratio.

Firstly, I  hypothesized that there is a ratio of IT investment in system providing to training that can maximize the effect. Here I define that "system providing" mean the hareware and software that provide to teachers and students, and "training" included the knowledge of Information Technology that they can choose, the knowledge to applicate them and the idea to combine them in education.

The method we will use is collect the information from different schools and find the relation between the ratio of investment and the effect. Questionnares can be sent to the IT coordinator to collect the information about the investment. The data collected is reliable if the questionnare is set in detailed to guide them what is included in which fields. However, the effectiveness of IT in education is difficult to measure. I think it can be approximately measure by setting questionnares to all the teachers and the students in the school to determine the effectiveness of IT in education. For examples, we can ask the teachers how much they know about the latest Information Technology and how often they use them; or we can ask the students do they agree it is useful for the Information Technology that the teacher used.

After the information is collected, we can calculate the Correlate Coefficient between them and make a conclusion of the most suitable ratio of IT investment in system providing to training.