Lacking the presence of human and social elements is claimed one major weakness that is hindering the growth of e-commerce. The emergence of social commerce (SC) might help ameliorate this situation. Social commerce is a new evolution of e-commerce that combines the commercial and social activities by deploying social technologies into e-commerce sites. Social commerce reintroduces the social a...

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...

This research reports on a value-based empirical investigation of the adoption of Twitter social media application. A cross-sectional survey-based study conducted through the web site of a North-American university revealed that people familiar with Twitter see more value in the hedonic side and less value in the social side, both in comparison to the utilitarian value of this social media. The...

1273 National Tax Journal Vol. LIII, No. 4, Part 3 Abstract The remote vendor problem challenges the sales tax as a revenue producer; even more critical, though, is damage to economic balance, efficiency, and fairness. Congressional relief from the physical presence rule—rendered obsolete by uncertainty about what presence means and by “click and brick” affiliates—requires no undue burden for m...

The paper presents an environment that enables museum curators to catalogue and publish on the web exhibits in multiple languages and media including 3D, video and images. The system is extendable to accommodate new media types, languages, exhibits, information categories, etc. Visitors have the potential to formulate dynamic personalised exhibit collections using search mechanisms provided by ...

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...