[Article] Why Mobile Phones are Useful to Students- by Abdulhafeez Oyewole

I think it should be a thing of joy to share my article featured last month on The Nation and CampusPortal, titled: Why Mobile Phones are Useful to Students. Below is the article:

Mobile phones are one of the fastest adopted innovations in the history. Today, findings have revealed that computer, internet and mobile phones have become important parts of human life
and that the latest of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), mobile phones, have become widespread in most parts of the world, especially among the young generation.

Statistically, young people constitute a greater percentage of mobile phone users in the world.
The integral roles play by mobile phones in the life of students, especially undergraduate students cannot be underscored. Mobile phones enhance students’ urge for communication which include sending and receiving of text messages and making and receiving of phone calls to parents, guardians and love ones.

It’s when majority of students are wondering when their roommates will be back to the room, whether they are given assignments or there is a fixed class and other odd moments that they find a good time to pick up their phones to text or call. But sure bet of all students do with their phones is chatting. Students chat very well even if they don’t have anything informative to exchange at that moment.

In Journalism and mass communication for instance, mobile phones are used as portable (pocket) media devices and services. With internet enabled phones like Smartphones, students can know what is happening around the world and can make happenings around them known worldwide within seconds. Mass communication students can equally convert their sophisticated phones to recording audio and audio-visual gadgets. They package, write and report events as they are.

Generally speaking, with mobile phones, students can access online materials related to their area of disciplines. They can browse for other informative, fascinating and tantalizing sites, events, programmes, social-cultural and religiously inclined stuffs and watch videos both online and offline with them.

In other words, students can surf the Net with their Internet enabled mobile phones. Across the board, students with Smartphones can use social media Apps which include Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, 2go, Badoo, Tumbir among others. This is so because Social Network Site owners have tailored their offerings to fit mobile crowds.

With features like location, tagging, picture upload, personal profile update and status updates, students can use their phone to broadcast who they are, where they are and what they are doing to all their friends and the entire public or users of a social networking site they can access at any
point in time.

To this end, students can easily get carried away in the euphoria of using these mobile phones and if care is not taken, they can be detrimental to student’s academic pursuits. Students are therefore charged to be an active audience of this new technology through purposeful use of their mobile devices and not letting these devices and other technologies use them.