As an academic advisor to Project NML, one of the things I do is try to keep my finger on the pulse of the research happening in the areas of media and literacy studies.

When I stumbled upon Howard Rheingold's syllabus for his graduate course on virtual communities and social media, I was excited. Many know Rheingold's work as the author of the book Smart Mobs, but he's also a terrific scholar and teacher at UC-Berkeley's School of Information. As he describes it, his course is directed toward graduate students, enabling them "to understand the kinds of analyses applied by different disciplines to questions about community, to apply methodologies of different disciplines to contemporary questions about media, technology, sociality, and society in a variety of settings, and to establish both theoretical and experiential foundations for making personal decisions and judgments regarding the relationship between mediated communication and human community."

I think his online resources are useful for anyone interested in this area, however, and I'd encourage folks to take a look at his resources for Participatory Media Literacies. It's absolutely incredible how many tools, sites, and sources of information are listed there. Truly a wealth of information! Thanks to Howard and his students for compiling it.