She has music blasting from her MP3 player almost every waking minute. She spends over seven hours a day on entertainment media. She checks her phone every ten minutes for updates from friends via messages and tweets. She is the average student.

Surrounded by portable devices which keep them in constant contact with their family, friends and the world, students today absorb, interact with and create content outside of the classroom more than they do inside it.

Lingnan University in Hong Kong recently surveyed 783 freshmen in their first week. 62 per cent had phones that could access the internet. 49 per cent of them use SMS several times a day. Nearly 70 per cent of them take photos with their mobile phones at least once a week. “Students carry mobile phones everywhere they go and use them all the time,” observes Dr David Kennedy, Director and Associate Professor, Teaching and Learning Centre of Lingnan University. “We should leverage the technologies and applications in these devices and take advantage of the skills students already possess by building activities and resources around the devices they have 24/7.”

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