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A Japanese college is introducing ID cards on the students mobile phones, because they know that they will be clumsy enough to leave their cards at home, but probably not their phones.

That’s the idea behind a plan being implemented at Japan’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology, where IDs will be stored on cellphones beginning this spring. The electronic IDs have several advantages over paper ones, including near-field communication functions like the ability to open locked doors and make purchases. However, we assume that at least one feature of the new cards will make students nostalgic for their old-school counterparts: we somehow suspect that changing your age via a deft application of an X-Acto Knife or some Wite-Out will be a little trickier with these. [Engadget]

So true, as a ‘high-tech’ school lots of students leave their card at home. I know I have done it and it is a real pain as you can’t have the school lunch, because they used the chip inside your ID card to pay for food.
Our school was trying to be cutting edge by allowing students to access their school email from their mobiles. But, to a tech-savvy person like me, I hardly ever use my school email because it is pointless. All my ‘good’ email goes through Gmail and it is easy to sift through. I have found Gmail’s spam filter to be one of the best available. We’re not even allowed to use our mobiles in school, so I have no idea what they were planning this for. If our school implemented something like this, I’m sure all the students would carry their phones around with them, even though they still do and still get ‘told off’ because they do so. But since our principal doesn’t like us to use mobiles in school because we would be communicating and not working, it will never happen. Never the less, it is still interesting to see something like this happening, and predictably it is happening in Japan.

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