I am currently participating in the 28th Annual Conference of the Japan Society for Educational Technology at Nagasaki University. It is the second day, but a typhoon is approaching, and I am not sure what will happen… It is raining as well. I wonder what will happen tomorrow… It seems that flight cancellations are already being announced.

This time, I gave a presentation in the social media session titled “Social Presence in Discussion within Text-based CMC Environments.” The term “social presence,” which frequently appears in my research, can be simplified—at the risk of being misunderstood—as “the sense of a participant’s presence in virtual communication.” Since it is virtual, the other person is, of course, not actually in front of you in reality; however, it refers to the concept of feeling as if the other person is right in front of you despite it being virtual.

However, this concept of social presence, which was proposed and started with the early research of Short et al. (1976), is perceived differently (and I believe redefined) depending on the development of information technology, the expansion of research fields, and the position of the researcher. In this era of social media, social presence can be said to be one of the good indicators for grasping the situation of a space in social media, but when conducting research, it is necessary to explain from which perspective of social presence the discussion is based. Furthermore, even when looking at it comprehensively, the relationship between each type of social presence has not yet been researched globally (though it feels like it might emerge soon…).

Therefore, in this study, I intend to examine the relationships between social presence organized from three standpoints. I presented this as an interim report of that research. We had participants engage in discussions using Twitter in groups of three (some were groups of two) and collected social presence data via questionnaires before and after the discussions. We are conducting factor analysis on that data to examine its constituent elements.

Moving forward, I plan to proceed with more detailed analysis, numerically analyzing the relationship between utterance logs and social presence. I am currently tagging the utterances together with my co-researcher, Prof. Kitamura from Tokyo Keizai University (who also came to see my presentation this time; thank you very much!). I hope we can produce some interesting results. I am looking forward to it.

I am making the presentation slides from the day available to the public. I hope they will be useful for those who are researching social media, especially those who are using it for educational purposes and wish to evaluate and conduct research on it, or those who wish to develop social media for education and learning. Recently, the number of papers in Educational Technology that evaluate “social presence” has been increasing globally, so I would like to proceed with my examination and research while reading various papers.

For the research that organizes social presence into three categories, please read Yamada & Kitamura (2010). I think there are many things you will not understand without reading this. It is available for free on CiNii, so I will also post the link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thank you. For those who came yesterday, the prerequisites presented in this paper were not well shared. I think there are parts you will understand if you read this.

Masanori Yamada, Satoshi Kitamura, Hideya Matsukawa, Masashi Misono (2012) Social Presence in Discussion within Text-based CMC Environments, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Japan Society for Educational Technology, pp.462-463, Slides

Reference Materials (I believe you will not understand the prerequisites without reading this)

Masanori Yamada & Satoshi Kitamura (2010) A Study on the Concept of “Social Presence” in CSCL Research, Japan Journal of Educational Technology, 33(3), pp.353-362, Click here