Social presence

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Definition

In the context of educational technology, we are mostly interested by issues related to virtual presence, however characteristics of physcial presence are also at stake.

• Presence refers to the illusion of "being there", i.e. is based on the idea of co-location
• Presence : feeling on being there in the environment (real or virtual)
• Social Presence : feeling of being together

Social presence as an issue in distance education

The GlobalEd questionnaire (Gunawerda and Zittle (1997) can give an implicit definition about the issues:

• Messages in GlobalEd were impersonal
• CMC is an excellent medium for social interaction
• I felt comfortable conversing through this text-based medium
• I felt comfortable introducing myself on GlobalEd
• The introduction enabled me to form a sense of online community
• I felt comfortable participating in GlobalEd discussions
• The moderators created a feeling of online community
• The moderators facilitated discussions in the GlobalEd conference
• Discussions using the medium of CMC tend to be more impersonal than face-to-face discussion
• CMC discussions are more impersonal than audio conference discussions
• CMC discussions are more impersonal than video teleconference discussions
• I felt comfortable interacting with other participants in the conference
• I felt that my point of view was acknowledged by other participants in GlobalEd
• I was able to form distinct individual impressions of some GlobalEd participants even though we communicated only via a text-based medium.

A 5-point rating scale was used for each question

Social presence in virtual environments

to do ...

Links

Compendium of Presence Measures

References

• Gunawerda, C.N., & Zittle, F.J. (1997). Social presence as a predictor of satisfaction within a computermediated conferencing environment. The American journal of distance education, 11(3), 8-26.
• Being There, Concepts, effects and measurements of user presence in synthetic environments. Edited by G. Riva, F. Davide & W.A. IJsselsteijn, Amsterdam: IOS Press (2003). ALL Chapters are downloadable in PDF format

• Tu, C. (2002a). The measurement of social presence in an online learning environment. International Journal on E-Learning 1(2), 34-45.

• Stefan Thie, Jacoliene van Wijk, A General Theory on Presence, Experimental evaluation of social virtual presence in a decision making task, Paper presented at Presence in Shared Virtual Environments Workshop, University College London, 10 - 11 June 1998. html