Tracking how students network online, where they go and the virtual communities they form is the focus of Rochester Institute of Technology professor Susan Barnes' latest study in social computing. Barnes, professor of communication at RIT, recently won a two-year $149,786 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an undergraduate online course in the new discipline of social media. Social media or computing is the use of software to facilitate social and organizational interaction and encompasses e-mail, instant messaging, interactive web sites and blogs. "Social networking is not just Facebook," Barnes says, referring to a web site popular among college students. "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."

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