The "Google generation" of today's students has grown up in a digital world. Most are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter; they organise their social lives through Facebook and MySpace; 75% of students have a profile on at least one social networking site. And they spend up to four hours a day online.
Modern students are happy to share and participate but are prone to impatience - being used to quick answers - and are casual about evaluating information and attributing it, and also about legal and copyright issues.
With almost weekly developments in technology and research added to increasingly web-savvy students' expectations, how are British universities keeping up?
Pretty well, according to Sir David Melville, chair of Lifelong Learning UK and author of a new report into how students' use of new technologies will affect higher education.