Presence in online classrooms has been linked to immediacy behaviors, instructor-student interaction, and participation. Research shows that presence can be managed and sustained, but little documentation exists about perceptions of the meaning of presence. An interview-based qualitative inquiry of three online instructors was conducted to discover how faculty create, promote, and sustain onlin...

The technological opportunities provided by digital learning environments for electronic communicative transactions between learners and teachers, now common in Higher Education in the United Kingdom (UK) challenge the traditional concept of a learner and teacher relationship. This paper considers electronic interaction between learners and module facilitators and draws on a small study that ev...

This document explores an ambiguity in the interpretation of the element of the Presence Information Data Format for Location Objects (PIDF-LO) in cases where PIDF-LO is conveyed by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). It provides recommendations for how the SIP location conveyance mechanism should adapt to this ambiguity. Documents standardizing the SIP location conv...

Linguistic UX design for Smart TV has been creating much heap as a means of new TV control. Since human voice displays powerful social presence, the issue with defining a Smart TV agent that interacts with users has a big impact in users' satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to analyze the linguistic patterns in vocal commands of TV users and to suggest underlying personas of Smart TV age...

Individuals, groups and organizations host places in the World Wide Web to attract visitors, but once they have established a web presence they usually maintain little or no awareness of visiting activity. However, the standard web infrastructure supports the capture of detailed activity-related information. In the first part of this paper, we contribute a preliminary study conducted with exper...

The present paper’s aim is to investigate how the participants of an online learning environment employed written language in a creative way through the spontaneous use of figurative language. The content analysis showed that figurative language was a means to express the social dimension either to refer to the self, feelings and emotions, or to conceptualize the components of the virtual learn...

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness...

Although the social relevance of digital gaming has been discussed and investigated in cultural and sociological readings, social context has been largely neglected in terms of in-game player experience. In this paper we present a study in which player experience is empirically tested comprehensively, with the focus on the interplay between player enjoyment and social context. Self reports on t...

In this paper we model the concept of ”coarseness”, typically used in texture image descriptions, by means of fuzzy sets. Specifically, we relate representative measures of this kind of texture with its presence degree. To obtain these ”presence degrees”, we collect assessments from polls filled by human subjects, performing an aggregation of these assessments by means of OWA operators. Using t...

This paper represents the current state of an action research approach to piece of “work in progress”, researching the use and usage of the Internet for marketing purposes by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The full paper discusses how the research was established, its design and development, and sets out clearly the operational parameters addressed. It also identifies through the de...