Wellesley College, Google launch new social networking course

Wellesley College and Google are collaborating on a new pilot course to be launched in the upcoming fall semester, in which students will be outfitted with Android Smartphones provided by Google to use and develop new social networking applications. The course, “The Socio-Technological Web,” will focus on the overlap between online social lives and the real world.

“It is becoming clear that problems exist in our real world transfer and get amplified in the virtual world created by the highly interconnected and ubiquitous computing,” said associate professor of computer science, P. Takis Metaxas in a statement.

The course will delve into issues such as virtual identity, fraud, and class differences while also examining the history of the original Web and its offshoot -- the social Web
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In addition to Wellesley, other area colleges including Olin College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University are also participating in the collaboration with Google.