Interactive, community-focused online tools--like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, wikis, and the educational software Blackboard--are becoming so dominant in the classroom that it's hard to imagine any professor or student making it through a week without them. Consider a recent survey conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group in collaboration with New Marketing Labs and the education-consulting group Pearson Learning Solutions. Drawing from almost 1,000 college and university faculty nationwide, the survey revealed that more than 80% use social media in some capacity, and more than half use the tools as part of their teaching. In this article, the author discusses the rapidly expanding universe of social media in higher education and how social media can and should impact higher education. He describes five interconnected "literacies" of social media: (1) attention; (2) participation; (3) collaboration; (4) network awareness; and (5) critical consumption. Taken together, these literacies underscore what might be the most inescapable truth about social media in education: No matter what one thinks of them, they aren't going away.