No abstract

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.

Magazines, often published periodically with a variety of contents, have long been successful in catering to magazine readers' various content needs and reading interests. In recent years, interactive digital magazines instead of replicas of printed magazines, based on digital devices have been gaining popularity and preference due to its unrivaled convenience and interactivity. To some extent, many people's magazine-reading habits have been changed due to their adoption of mobile digital devices. This study is designed to analyze mobile digital devices' influence on magazine reading habits amongst university students in Hong Kong. Issues such as mobile digital devices' level of adoption amongst university students and their preferences on devices for different magazine types are analyzed. Our findings show that university students in Hong Kong read more types of magazines after they started to use mobile digital devices, mainly using tablets. The findings of the study are useful for librarians (academic librarians in particular) and digital publishing vendors to explore the issues concerning services and collection development of interactive digital resources.

Purpose Existing studies reflect that traditional teaching–learning relationships between supervisors and graduate students have become disjointed with actuality seriously. In particular, there are practical difficulties in handling many students from coursework-based postgraduate degrees under current university curricula. Therefore, this study aims to explore the relationship between research supervisors and graduate students on social media, which is popular among students. Design/methodology/approach This study surveyed 109 graduate students from two majors (population around 100 each) of a university in Hong Kong to explore their information usage for research on social media, related attitudes and their perceived supervisor relationships. The differences between the two majors were also compared. Findings The authors’ findings indicated that graduate students were active on social media, and social media has successfully provided effective alternate ways for students to communicate with their research supervisors. Social media could improve relationships between supervisors and research students and among fellow students. Besides education purposes, students also discussed their personal affairs on social media with supervisors, demonstrating enhanced trusted relationships. Graduate students also showed confidence in the further application of social media in higher education. Some differences between respondents from the two programs were also found in terms of communication contents, strengths, personal preferences and purposes for using social media. Originality/value Scant studies focus on the relationship between supervisors and graduate students under the current social media environment, especially for students from coursework-based postgraduate degrees. At a deeper level, for the widespread use of social media in the information age, this study explores the specific changes brought about by social media. Therefore, this study is of great theoretical and practical value to graduate education under the current social media environment.