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In recent years, with the general adoption of smartphones with computing power comparable to desktop computers, mobile applications (apps) have experienced a surge in popularity. However, there are a few studies conducted about their educational use, especially in Southeast Asia. To fill up this research gap, this study aims to provide a current overview of mobile apps usage in higher education. Besides exploring the actual use of apps, Technology Acceptance Model was applied to examine (1) undergraduate students' perceptions, which involve perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU), towards adopting mobile apps for educational purposes, and (2) their overall attitude (OA) toward such adoption. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used to collect data from 150 undergraduate students in Business, Education, and Engineering in Hong Kong. The results show undergraduate students use mobile apps frequently to engage in learning activities related to their academic studies, with a particularly focus on communication and collaborative working, accessing academic resources, and checking dictionary. However, the discrepancies in using apps for academic purposes are not significant between the three faculties. Meanwhile, PU has a more positive impact on OA compared with the impact of PEOU on OA. The investigation helps tertiary institutions, library service providers, and educators develop and assess the strategic planning for education collaborating with mobile apps. This paper could also give app developers some hints on the app design based on the actual usage and students' information needs.

Mobile learning (m-learning) is gaining its importance in recent years. For libraries, it is inevitable to adapt to this trend and provide various information services and support for mlearning. This paper studies the m-learning usage of Library and Information Science (LIS) students, who will be the new blood for the library in future. In this paper, we invited 267 subjects from Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan to participate in our online survey. We found that LIS students from these regions do adopt communication tools and social media for mlearning. However, they are less frequent to use their smartphones for academic reading. Plus, they rely more on search engines for fulfilling their information needs instead of library resources. We also found that the lacking of the mobile version website constitutes a significant barrier in m-learning, but the lacking of mobile apps is relatively acceptable by the respondents. The result of this study shows that there are no big differences in m-learning usage among the three regions, except that LIS students from Hong Kong are accessing the learning management platforms via their smartphones more frequently compared to students from Japan and Taiwan.