A Study On The Application Of Micro-blogging In College Education From The Perspective Of Learners' Motivation

With the emergence and development of many social micro-blogging platforms, micro-blog has become the most rapid social interaction mode due to its features of strong mobility, real-time information, fragmentary dissemination and innovative interaction in recent years. Micro-blogging also has a huge impact in college students, thus gets the attention of educational researchers. The purpose of this study is to explore the learners'motivations in micro-blogging and the relationships with intentions and behaviors to get the inspirations of how to use micro-blogging in college education.This paper describes the basic and extended functions of micro-blogging, and summarizes its characteristics. Combing theory of informal learning, this paper presents the view of micro-blogging mainly benefits the informal learning. Then on the basic of theory of motivation and relative researches and documents before, the author divides motivations of leaning with micro-blogging into5categories:technical motivation, social motivation, informational motivation, sharing motivation and expressive motivation. Taking the TAM as the fundamental structure, this study constitutes a hypothetical model concerning motivations and behaviors of learning with micro-blogging. In this model, the motivations being taken as independent variables, intentions as intervening variables, behaviors as dependent variables, and characteristics such as gender, education background and duration as external variables. The primary goals are both the strength of motivations and the relationships between variables, direct or indirect.Survey methods are adopted. This study uses network questionnaire to survey the college students in Educational Technology Micro-group who learning with micro-blogging. Through analysis210valid samples using statistical methods, the hypotheses are verified and the model is amended. It is concluded that:(1)The5motivations of learners who are leaning with micro-blogging are all strong. Informational motivation and technology motivation are the most strong, but social motivation is the most weak. Different learner's has different intensity to the same motivation. Technology motivation is strong, but there is a great individual otherness.(2)Learners'motivations have huge positive impacts to intention, especially informational motivation and technology motivation.(3)Learners'motivations have both direct and indirect impact to behaviors. Network social motivation (the part of social motivation) directly influents the level of participation, and indirectly influents the depth of participation, too.(4)It shows that the different motivations have totally different impacts on the level of participation and the depth of participation. The level of participation only has relationship with sharing and expressive motivation, but the depth of participation with5motivations.According above conclusions, two inspirations have got. On the one hand, college should take full advantage of the micro-blogging's rich information and provide good technical support. On the other hand, college should afford personalized environment to encourage students to express and share.