Teacher immediacy has been a widely studied construct with the overall finding that being immediate is good. Verbal and nonverbal immediacy has been associated with increased motivation to study and learning. The most common methodology used to measure teacher immediacy has been student reports. An underlying assumption of this methodology is that students are able to objectively observe and re...

Facebook and Twitter, two of the most popular social networking sites, have different network structures and communication purposes. To examine how their differences affect users’ language use, we conducted a comparative analysis on the linguistic pattern of Facebook status updates and tweets. Differences were found in word categories indicating verbal immediacy, emotionality, topic, and colloq...

This paper discusses course design factors affecting the success of asynchronous online learning with a specific focus on the social development of learning communities through online discussion. It reports on an empirical investigation of correlations between 22 course design factors and student perceptions of satisfaction, learning, and interaction with instructors and classmates using data c...

Operationalizing mediated presence: Initial steps toward a measure of the construct This paper reports on an exploratory project to investigate mediated presence, a construct defined as the extent to which participants in a virtual environment perceive other participants in that environment as real, immediate or salient. Development and initial testing of a prompt designed to consistently diffe...

This research explores how shared, learner-constructed representations serve as resources for conversation in face-to-face and online situations. An important role of shared representations in collaborative learning is to facilitate the ease of reference to previously introduced ideas. Complex ideas are more easily expressed when their component ideas can be indicated with simple gestures. Yet ...