JMSC to Play Major Role at IB World Student Conference

JMSC faculty members, alums and students will be playing major roles in the upcoming IB World Student Conference, which is to be held at The University of Hong Kong next month.

The conference, which will bring secondary students from International Baccalaureate programs in over 25 countries together to discover the meaning of global citizenship, will take place at HKU August 11 through 18.  This will be the first time the conference has been held in Asia, and the theme for this year’s session is iResponsibility: Explore How We Engage in the Online World.

JMSC faculty members Masato Kajimoto and King-wa Fu will both be speaking at the conference on August 13.

Kajimoto, who worked as an online reporter and producer for CNN before joining the JMSC, will lead a workshop titled Social Media and News: How to be a Discerning News Consumer.

“I will discuss how to identify reliable information on the Internet, especially on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter,” Kajimoto said. “It’s also an opportunity for me to meet high school students from around the world and learn how they deal with social media in their own cultures.”

Dr. Fu, who holds a doctoral degree in journalism from the JMSC, will host a session called Constructing China’s Public Voice from ‘Big Data’: About Our ‘Weiboscope’ Project.

The session will survey how social issues are discussed online in China.  It will also provide an overview of Weiboscope, an Internet tool that was created at the JMSC to track and record posts deleted by mainland censors from Sina Weibo, the mainland’s most popular social networking website.

Kevin Lau, a former assistant lecturer at the JMSC, will also be on hand on August 13 to lead an interactive workshop on visualizing and communicating ideas digitally.

Dr. Li-Fung Cho, who received her doctoral degree from the JMSC, will be discussing the impact the Internet has had on investigative journalism in China on August 16. Cho is a teaching consultant in the Sociology Department at the University of Hong Kong specializing in the Chinese news media.

AJ Libunao, a JMSC online media producer, will lead a team of JMSC students who are going to provide live coverage of the conference.

“I’m taking a team of fresh grads, current students, and incoming students to cover the conference like a large-scale live news event,” Libunao said. “We’re going to provide coverage by writing stories, taking photographs, shooting video, and using social media. We’re also going to make sure it is learning experience for our students. The grads and current students are going to train the incoming students and give them an idea of how we work, in a fast-paced environment.”

Suhani Jain (BJ, 2012), a JMSC alum and the main coordinator for the conference, said the JMSC’s tech-savvy instructors will give participating students valuable insights as well as hands-on skills.

“I hope the participants can take all their learning at the conference and turn it into palpable impact for social good and innovation,” Jain said.