Emergence of The Social Presence Theory
As computer-mediated communication has evolved a more relational view of social presence has emerged. Social presence has come to be viewed as the way individuals represents themselves in their online environment. It’s a personal stamp that indicates that the individual is available and willing to engage and connect with other persons in their online community. Social presence is demonstrated by the way messages are posted and how those messages are interpreted by others. Social presence defines how participants relate to one another which in turn affects their ability to communicate effectively.
Seldom, if ever, do traditional curriculum designers intentionally consider social presence in course design. Face-to-face (F2F) courses with their groupings of people in the same place at the same time, their reliance on communication skills used in daily life, and their delivery of sight, sound, smell (and maybe touch – let’s hope not taste) awareness of others sharing space inherently provide an awareness of the presence of others among members. While in itself this produces awareness of others, we may only loosely call it social presence. However, for most, it suffices. For online courses, the opposite is generally true.
The lack of cues for the physical presence of others in an online classroom and the lack of passive connection between users brought about by technology that facilitates discussion but not connection across distances requires designers and teachers to account for and construct replicates of these in an online classroom. And while there still exists F2F curriculum wherein the development of social presence is left to happenstance, there is no room between success and failure in an online course when it comes to the need to develop social presence.
However, more recent developments in online education combine the use of both asynchronous (preproduced content accessed individually by students on the web) and synchronous (real-time, simultaneous live connections of students together) components. Depending on the technology used, synchronous sessions can provide both audio and video connection, allowing an interchange involving both sight and sound, and all the rich nonverbal communication inherent in tone of voice and facial expression. While smell, taste and touch remain inaccessible still, the look, actions and sound of one's colleagues now readily are. And as result, a much more full social interchange is possible with the potential to greatly increase social presence.
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