UPDATE - Social networking becoming a college course

The Rochester Institute of Technology is setting out to explore social networking’s impact in the classroom with a new study funded by the National Science Foundation.

RIT announced Wednesday that it has received a two-year, $149,786 grant from the NSF to develop an undergraduate course around social computing. The course, which is expected to be available to RIT students in spring 2008, will look at how college students use social networking and whether it brings experts from outside the university into the classroom.

“The grant is significant,” says RIT professor Susan Barnes. With the NSF support and existing financial support from Microsoft the university’s Laboratory for Social Computing is funded by two respected organizations in technology, “which gives us more credibility.”

The lab was created two years ago and is also “researching social networks and advertising.”

In a similar vein, the University of Michigan’s School of Information (SI) announced this week that it is now offering a Master of Science in Information that specifically focuses on social computing. The university says it’s the first of its kind in the country at the master's level.

The University of Michigan’s Judy Lawson, director of academic and career services for SI, says, “employers want graduates with a deep understanding of how to manage information and at the same time make it easily accessible to users,” in an article published on the school’s Web site. With this new program, Lawson says the university is meeting the demands of the workplace.

Today social networking is being used not only by college students to further their education, but also by political workers to gather presidential campaign volunteers and by those in business trying to stay connected.

RIT calls social computing the “use of software to facilitate social and organizational interaction and encompasses e-mail, instant messaging, interactive Web site and blogs.”

“Social networking is not just Facebook," Barnes says in a statement. "It’s peer-to-peer sharing of information. It all ties in with user-generated control. It’s such a new medium and people don’t know where it’s going, so we need to look at it."

The course will be open to 90 students, who will be given “social computing tasks” in three different formats: myCourses, SecondLife and an open-source software platform that students can modify. Professors will be able to track where students go online and how they interact in each format, RIT says.

Barnes also says the course will introduce students “to the job area of social networking and what types of jobs they could look for, such as programming, document production, creating their own social network. In the research area we hope to learn about online learning environments and how students form relationships in them.”