Liam Rourke, Terry Anderson, D. Randy Garrison, Walter Archer (1999)
Assessing Social Presence In Asynchronous Text-based Computer Conferencing
The Journal of Distance Education / Revue de l'Éducation à Distance, Vol 14, No 2 (1999)
Community of inquiry Model -
was specifically designed to guide the use of computer conferencing to support critical thinking in higher education.
Models learning occurring in the space where cognitive, social and teacher influences overlap
Cognitive presence - the extent to which the participants in any particular configuration of a community of inquiry are able to construct meaning through sustained communication.
social presence, defined as the ability of learners to project themselves socially and emotionally in a community of inquiry. – therefore it supports the cognitive and affective elements of learning. IN CMC, unlike FTF instructional contexts, It is a function of both learners and teachers
“Teacher immediacy is conceptualized as those nonverbal behaviors that reduce physical and/or psychological distance between teachers and students” (p. 544). She found that engaging in eye contact with students, adopting a relaxed body posture, using gestures, and smiling improved students affect toward the practices promoted in the course, the subject matter of the course, and the course instructor.
Gorham (1988) expanded the definition of teacher immediacy behaviors to include oral behaviors such as talking about experiences that have occurred outside class, using humor, addressing students by name, and praising students’ work or comments. Her results suggest that these types of behavior also contributed significantly to students’ affective learning
immediacy
traced back to Mehrabian (1969, p203 ) ‘those communication behaviors that enhance closeness to and nonverbal interaction with another” - not implies that immediacy is given by the non verbal
Sproull and Keisler (1986) regarded the implications of Mehrabian’s (1969) work from a different perspective. They argued that the critical difference between face-to-face communication and mediated communication was the absence of social context cues. Their research indicated that the lack of cues to define the nature of a social situation led to uninhibited communication such as hostile and intense language (i.e., flaming), greater self-absorption, and a resistance to defer speaking turns to higher-status participants.
CMC & immediacy
The capacity of CMC to support highly affective interpersonal interactions is supported by studies that focus on its use in educational settings. Angeli, Bonk, and Hara (1998) conducted a content analysis of a course conducted entirely through CMC. They found that 27% of the total message content consisted of expressions of feeling, self-introductions, jokes, compliments, greetings, and closures. McDonald (1998) studied the development of group dynamics in educational computer conference settings and found that expressions of openness and solidarity were significant elements, rising from 18% and 40% of the total respectively when the conference began to 36% and 54% at its conclusion.
Analysis Framework for social presence
An important step in content analysis is the development of categories and indicators that researchers can then use to analyze the transcripts. We arrived at the categories for social presence that we used through an iterative process. First, behavioral indices were derived from the three categories of social presence articulated by Garrison et al. (2000, i.e., emotional expression, open communication, and group cohesion). Second, indicators of social interaction that had been derived from the media capacity, teacher presence, and group interaction literature were applied deductively to the analysis. Third, additional indices were deduced from careful readings of the transcripts and then added to the coding scheme. This process culminated in the formation of three broad categories of communicative responses that contribute to social presence. These categories correspond directly to Garrison et al.’s original categories. However, they were relabeled to reflect better the nature of the emergent indicators that define them in this study. Open communication is now referred to as interactive responses, referring to indices of threaded interchanges combined with messages of a socially appreciative nature. Emotional presence has been renamed as affective responses and group cohesion as cohesive responses.
Affective
Kuehn (1993) noted that text-based, asynchronous interlocutors employ unconventional symbolic representations such as emoticons to facilitate expressiveness in the medium. Gunawardena and Zittle (1997) found that conference participants “enhanced their socioemotional experience by using emoticons to express missing nonverbal cues in written form” (p. 8).
Teacher immediacy literature has identified the use of humor as a contributory factor to immediacy and subsequently to learning (Christenson & Menzel, 1998;
Cutler (1995) explains that “the more one discloses personal information, the more others will reciprocate, and the more individuals know about each other the more likely they are to establish trust, seek support, and thus find satisfaction” (p. 17)
Interaction
Eggins and Slade (1997) add that responses and rejoinders serve several beneficial purposes in conversation. They build and sustain relationships, express a willingness to maintain and prolong contact, and tacitly indicate interpersonal support, encouragement, and acceptance of the initiator. Using the “reply” feature to post messages, quoting directly from the conference transcript, and referring explicitly to the content of others’ messages are all types of interactive response in CMC.
Walberg (1984) conducted a meta-analysis of 3,000 studies that examined the effects of educational interventions designed to improve academic achievement. Reinforcement was at the top of his list and had an effect size of 1.17.
Complimenting and acknowledging, and expressing appreciation are ways of communicating reinforcement in a text-based medium.
Cohesive
This category is exemplified by activities that build and sustain a sense of group commitment.
Phatics are defined as communication “used to share feelings or to establish a mood of sociability rather than to communicate information or ideas” (GuruNet, 1999)
Vocatives, that is, addressing participants by name, are also an important expression of cohesion.
A variation of the vocative effect occurs at the group level when participants refer to the group with inclusive pronouns such as we, our, us, or group.
Eggins and Slade (1997) note, disagreement and critical evaluation are more characteristic of those who share strong bonds, rather than of new or transient acquaintances.
Method
Corpus extracted from week 5 of two( 14 members in 1 and 17 in the other) text based 13 week modules. New topic each week,
Discussion
the presence of replies and quoted messages may be a superficial artifact of conferencing communication rather than a defining indicator of social presence. The remaining indicators represent a more labor-intensive, and thus a more conscious and willful, effort on the part of the student to interact with others. According to this hypothesis, referring to other students by name and referring explicitly to the contents of another’s message are better indicators of interaction than having another student’s name or message appear automatically due to software features.
