With the development of Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data and other network and media technologies, portable mobile devices and instant access to network services have made it possible in terms of “location”, “real-time”, “identity” and “interactivity”.  Social media, which has inherent advantages, has rapidly risen, and is quickly and seamlessly connected with human life.  Social media is a new form of media, and it also has media characteristics. In the field of education, it can also play a role in carrying teaching content and building a bridge between teachers and students.  In view of the dependence of teachers and students on social media in colleges and universities, explore its application, problems and countermeasures in college education, so as to promote the better use of social media by teachers and students in colleges and universities, promote learning and improve the quality of teaching.

Second, the concept and characteristics of social media The concept of social media first appeared in the American scholar Anthony?  Mayfield (Antony Mayfield) (2007) in an e-book called “What is Social Media”.  It refers to websites and technology platforms that allow people to write, share, evaluate, discuss, and communicate with each other.  In short, social media is a combination of social media and social networks. It is an “interactive” media.  As a new form of media, social media has specific forms such as domestic Weibo, WeChat, QQ and Renren.com, and foreign ones such as facebook, twitter, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace.

Compared with traditional media, social media has three characteristics: 1. Social people are social animals and cannot live alone, so their social ability often determines their social recognition.  Traditional media “dissemination” pays more attention to information content, but ignores the “relationship” behind the dissemination. The emergence of social media has re-established mass communication channels on the interpersonal communication network.  With the innate advantages of social networks in terms of “location”, “real-time”, “identity” and “interactivity”, social media changed the role of people in the network and led to corresponding changes in social relations.  Human beings have more and more realistic attributes in virtual space, and human real world and virtual space are gradually converging. User Generated Content (UGC) social media has self-media attributes. It is different from the top-down discourse power structure of traditional media. Instead, it is adjusted from the original “Knowledge, Trust, and Action” mode of dissemination and understanding to the  “As a result, the information pyramid of the dissemination subject and the power subject has changed: the establishment of relationships and trust should be better than the transmission of information and the popularization of knowledge.  Social media aggregates users due to their relationships and interests, and can easily form a “tribalized” and “circularized” information community and action community. Even the “silent majority” in the real world has an affiliation in social networks.  Sense and voice.  Social media content is created by the masses, users generate content, and consumers are producers. Chad is managed by the BBC Global News Department?  Sambrook’s words are: “The audience is on the stage.”

Social media has long become an indispensable tool in people’s lives. Schools have also realized the need to teach new technologies and popularize new communication methods. Foreign universities have taken the lead in opening new teaching courses with social media applications as the content.  Syracuse University in the United States has opened two courses: “You Must Know Social Media” and “Syracuse University Social Media Theory and Practice”. Among them, “You Must Know Social Media” emphasizes practical business applications and how to measure return on investment.  The homework of the course includes 20 Twitter messages posted every week, which are tracked by class-specific tags, using influence analysis tools such as Klout to analyze the spread and effectiveness of the information.  Professor Ward, who offered the course, believes that students must master the necessary digital and social skills to reflect their competitiveness in job competition.  Subsequently, other top universities also followed up.  New York University, Columbia University and the University of Washington have launched a large number of undergraduate courses on social networking, marketing and learning; Columbia Business School and Harvard Business School have launched social media marketing courses; New England College has even launched a comprehensive social media MBA. 

Social media, an auxiliary tool for classroom teaching, was regarded as a scourge by teachers and the functional departments of the school after it entered the classroom of colleges and universities. It was chased and intercepted by various parties, and even “man-machine separation”, but the effect was very low, and it was still difficult to conceal the physical presence and psychological absence of students  Embarrassment.  “If you can’t beat them, then join them.” So some teachers began to seek the advantages of social media in communication, cooperation and coordination, to reform teaching models and methods, and to seek the optimization of educational opportunities and educational productivity.

There are four typical applications of social media in the classroom: (①WeChat classroom. In the WeChat classroom created by the School of Economics of the Central University of Finance and Economics, instructors use their mobile phones to send voices while using the computer’s web version of WeChat to supplement pictures and texts. At this time  , Students can listen to the class online anywhere they can use WeChat. 2 Sharing and commenting on class notes online. GradeGuru and Notehall are two online note-distribution platforms where students can search for notes from a class in the school or similar subjects in other schools.  On the one hand, it satisfies the needs of students with learning difficulties to obtain high-quality study notes resources, and on the other hand, through paid rewards and the attention of others, it encourages note sharing and strives for excellence. ③Classroom creative presentation and reporting. Prezi is a kind of mainly through zooming action and  A presentation software for quick actions to make ideas more vivid and interesting. It breaks the traditional single-line sequence of Powerpoint, and uses a systematic and structural integration method to demonstrate. It is a way of presentation that suddenly pulls from one object to another.  Objects, with rotation and other actions, will have more visual impact. ④Classroom interaction. For example, teachers and students can share files in the QQ group.

The online education platform breaks the barriers of learning time and space, enabling both teaching parties to realize synchronous or asynchronous information transmission in the case of “physical absence”.  A “typical” user of an online education platform is often a learning individual in the presence of one person.  In the virtual situation of “absence of the body”, learners will have a sense of loneliness with no friends and a sense of alienation from the cold computer screen, which will lead to problems such as inefficient learning, loss of users, and even the decline of the platform.  In fact, the core of online education should be the combination or unification of teaching and learning, and online education should place more emphasis on learners’ interactive communication, active participation and cooperative learning.  It involves the entire learning chain of students, including lectures, exercises, Q&A, knowledge feedback and so on.  American sociologist Randall?  Collins believes that mutual attention and emotional connection can form a kind of “instant shared reality”, and the unity of the group and the identity symbols between group members will also be formed.  The core of social media is “socialization”, that is, user participation and interaction, which allows learners to conduct virtual “co-presence” interactive sharing activities in the real context of “physical absence”.

Social media has reshaped the way of teacher-student communication. Effective education and teaching activities are always based on teacher-student communication.  As Jaspers said: “The so-called education is nothing more than the spiritual and physical communication activities between human and human subjects, whether it is the teaching of knowledge, the regulation of behavior, or the shaping of character, it is realized in the interaction between teachers and students.”  Social media has social attributes, which not only facilitates the communication between teachers and students, but also expands the time and space of teacher-student communication and forms new social network relationships. Can teachers and students be in communication?  Facing the embarrassment of face-to-face and the restriction of status level, communicate and “focus” with each other as friends to establish a long-term interactive relationship. In this new interactive relationship, teachers should act as opinion leaders, speak positively, and actively think about with students  The exchange of knowledge and knowledge guides students to establish correct interpersonal relationships in virtual social networks, obtain effective information, realize self-expression and form comprehensive cognition.Social media has reshaped the way of communication between home and school. Many teachers communicate with parents about students through social platforms. Schools can also provide parents with some warning suggestions on how to use social media to communicate. Parents use WeChat, qq, Facebook  Wait for social media to make friends with your children and help them avoid bad information.  5. Expand the way of education management. Social media stationed in education not only provides new ideas for education and teaching activities, but also provides new ideas for education management. The typical application is university official microblog.  In a notice issued by the National Internet Information Power Office on September 10, 2014, it was stated: Actively encourage education departments at or above the county level to open official accounts for government affairs, grasp the laws and characteristics of mobile Internet, and meet the diverse and multi-level information needs of Internet users.  As of January 2016, statistics from the Ministry of Education show that among the 75 directly affiliated colleges and universities, 73 have opened official Weibo, and all have opened official WeChat.  The emergence and application of university official microblogs plays an important role in shaping the image, strengthening communication, promoting teaching, providing services, and increasing resources.