For many organizations their websites are the first impression customers have of their companies. The impact and importance of web design on organizations continues to dramatically increase. Yet many organizations continue to struggle to find tools to strategically analyze their websites and overall online presence. While there have been numerous studies offering “best practices” for website de...

One of the main challenges faced by the multi-agent community is to ensure the coordination of autonomous agents in open heterogeneous multi-agent systems. In order to coordinate their behaviour, the agents should be able to interact with each other. Social commitments have been used in recent years as an answer to the challenges of enabling heterogeneous agents to communicate and interact succ...

Current videoconference systems combine face-to-face (F2F) and mediated interactions. We extend the use of a Social Presence measure to a real-world setting combining co-located and remotely located people completing a collaboration activity. Comparisons between physically present and remotely located others did not indicate significant differences in social presence regarding media condition. ...

Building on past research on trust and social presence, this study explores how multimedia vividness and social presence affect trusting beliefs and subsequently trusting intentions of a computer-based decision aid. An experiment involving 550 subjects examines the effect that decision aid personality and increased levels of vividness (text, voice, and animation) have on social presence, and do...

Digital technologies are increasingly used for communication between service personnel and customers. These digital service encounters bring along two changes: First, diverse digital channels such as text, audio, or video communication vary in the perceived media richness and perceived social presence of the counterpart. Second, digital channels allow service providers to employ service personn...

We study how pairs of children interact socially and express their emotions while playing games in different communicative settings. In particular, we study how such interactions can vary for environments that differ regarding the level of mediation and the associated feelings of social presence. Overall, the study compared three conditions (one face-to-face gameplay condition, and two video-me...

Devising pedagogical strategies that will engage students in ways which will assure the development of their skills of critique and analysis presents a challenge to tertiary teachers. This paper draws on data from a recent case-based evaluation study to argue that innovative assessment and the development of social presence in online learning environments can contribute to developing skills of ...

We compare people greatly affected by a crisis with those less affected to explore how level of crisis influences their response to experiencing nature. A questionnaire comprising a validated protocol to evaluate frequency of stress conditions, the level of crisis retention, reorientation and rehabilitation potential was answered by 547 individuals. The questionnaire also comprises items on eve...

The correlation between three conceptions of social presence (seen as 1. a subjective quality of a medium that determines the quality of the communication and perception of others, 2. self-projection onto the group, and 3. identification with the group) and different aspects of perceived learning in online discussion groups were tested. Six hundreds and fifty nine students completed a web-based...

An increasing number of people with lifelong disability are active members of virtual worlds. Through their avatars, people with disability are able to participate in social, work related and educational activities in the virtual world. The aim for this paper was to explore how people with lifelong disability experienced the relationship with their virtual self and others, applying the lens of ...