An increase of asynchronous online discussions in website provides much opportunity for L2 learners from different global communities to be exposed to the target language at their own pace and time. However, no research looking at the essentials of social presence and cognitive presence in creating a supportive learning environment in such a context has been done. This study investigated the pa...

In a recent dissertation study, research was conducted to evaluate online instructors’ characteristics and preferences concerning the use of a telementor, or online instructor’s assistant, as a part on an online course. Those who participated in the anonymous survey came from a sample of two thousand online instructors from colleges and universities located across the United States. Of those co...

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...

Purpose: This paper outlines a social epistemological and ethical warrant for engaging in knowledge exchange on the social web, and emphasises socio-cognitive and emotional factors behind motivation and credibility in communities supported by social software. An attempt is made to identify positive and negative patterns of interaction from this perspective and to argue for more positive interve...

How does mere social presence affect cognitive processes? The extant literature has focused on the impact of social presence on cognitive resources. The present study extends this work by focusing on the positivity of cognitive appraisal. Building on recent findings it was predicted that the traits neuroticism and impression management will differentially moderate the effect, such that neurotic...

Technologically created social presence (SP), i.e. the feeling of human contact, is gaining in importance in today’s digital world where interaction becomes more and more impersonal. However, information systems (IS) research lacks a clear notion of both the concept itself and possible technological design decisions that could foster SP. Within this paper, we address this gap by providing an ov...