This paper presents a working memory based model of attention in presence, in which presence depends on the allocation of cognitive resources to process an environment. In the model, media decoders (cognitive modules specialized in decoding particular media) extract data about the environment in an abstracted form. In order for presence to occur, a certain amount of working memory is required f...

In recent years, there has been increasing interest, both in the potential of computer games as learning and teaching tools, and in research into their use. However, most frameworks for serious games evaluation do not explicitly consider social aspects. On the contrary, we believe that social aspects have to be considered as an essential component of the ’virtual’ life of most current users. Fo...

Designing and implementing successful online learning has been at the forefront of institutional agendas since digital learning increased in market demand over the last decade. However there is still ongoing debate as to the “how” of this arduous task. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) is one learning design method that has seen potential in the field, but practical implementation of designing for...

We describe how static anthropomorphic images of avatars affected users’ emotion perceptions of interactants and medium when they engaged in a conversation on a mobile telephone. We utilized measurements of social presence, specifically interactant satisfaction and social richness of medium. The items of these two measurements were modified to include new items of emotional credibility. The res...

This study articulates the construct of social presence and develops a social presence questionnaire for examining online collaborative learning with tests for reliability and validity. Questionnaire items were developed by revising the social presence questionnaire developed by Picciano in 2002 as well as reviewing research in the literature of computer support for cooperative systems (CSCW). ...

The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight from an evaluation that explored the viability, usefulness and potential of the online platform SocialLearn in providing an online community for Open University Associate Lecturers (part-time teaching staff). Findings from two focus groups and a staff survey highlighted both the potential of an online community and the barriers to successful im...

The theory of social presence is perhaps the most popular construct used to describe and understand how people socially interact in online learning environments. However, despite its intuitive appeal, researchers and practitioners alike often define and conceptualize this popular construct differently. In fact, it is often hard to distinguish between whether someone is talking about social inte...

One of the key challenges of distributed teams is the lack of social presence resulting from multiple work locations. Virtual environments (VEs) have been viewed as a collaboration tool for distributed teams that can enhance social presence via shared collaboration space and avatars. We observed, recorded, and analyzed the VE meetings of a globally distributed team. Data were analyzed through q...

It is proposed to translate the mind-matter distinction into terms of mental and physical time. In the spirit of this idea, we hypothesize a relation between the intensity of mental presence and a crucial time scale (some seconds) often referred to as a measure for the duration of nowness. This duration is experimentally accessible and might, thus, offer a suitable way to characterize the inten...

We present a system designed for supporting e-lectures. The concepts inspiring the design process were dialogical knowledge construction and situated editing of contents. The design methodology rested on an inter-disciplinary approach and was based on a co-evolutionary process where concept design, technology design and activity design were carried out in parallel so that each strand of the pro...