Social presence in online multimodal communication: A framework to analyse online interactions between language learners

New technologies permeate every aspect of life, not least human communication. Collaboration and social interaction have become buzz words in online communication and education mediated by Web 2.0 technologies and inspired by socio-constructivist theories of learning. Social presence theory explores this mediation through which individuals project themselves socially and emotionally into the community (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 1999). Understanding the experience of social presence is crucial for its strategic use in online learning, while the pivotal role of communication makes social presence an indispensable component of language teaching. Although social presence theory has evolved from a media richness view as a quality of the media (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) to a relational view as a quality of relational aspects of communication (Kehrwald, 2008), the multimodal nature of new technologies has not previously been explored. Social presence research has also largely ignored the role of language (verbal or nonverbal, native or foreign) on the mediation process. This exploratory case study investigates social presence in dyadic online foreign language interaction via desktop videoconferencing (DVC) between trainee language teachers. Multiple data sources (DVC recordings, interviews, questionnaires) are qualitatively analysed, drawing on principles of thematic analysis, interactional linguistics and social semiotics. The findings highlight the need for workable methods, tools and theories to research and analyse multimodal online communication. Social presence theory is revised to accommodate multi modal foreign-language interactions, and to incorporate potential differences between the ways individuals intend to project themselves and the ways this projection might be perceived by others in the community. An original approach to analysing and classifying language-learner interactions is demonstrated. Pedagogical implications stress the skills required to support rewarding educational experiences for both learners and teachers. Despite the specific features of the case study; the findings--can be extrapolated to virtually all areas of online communication

Developing and Evaluating Visual Analogies to Support Insight and Creative Problem Solving

The primary aim of this thesis is to gain a richer understanding of visual analogies for insight problem solving, and, in particular, how they can be better developed to ensure their effectiveness as hints. While much work has explored the role of visual analogies in problem solving and their facilitative role, only a few studies have analysed how they could be designed. This thesis employs a mixed method consisting of a practice-led approach for studying how visual analogies can be designed and developed and an experimental research approach for testing their effectiveness as hints for solving visual insight problems

Natural Computing and Beyond

This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15–16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28–30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). This volume compiles refereed contributions to various aspects of natural computing, ranging from computing with slime mold, artificial chemistry, eco-physics, and synthetic biology, to computational aesthetics

Mothers and Daughters at Imperial Crossroads: Expressions of Status, Economy and Nurture in 16th Century Mexico.

My dissertation, Mothers and Daughters at Imperial Crossroads: Expressions of Status, Economy, and Nurture in 16th Century Mexico considers an often overlooked but foundational aspect of colonization in the New World: the transfer of status and wealth through indigenous women in a confluence of political economy and ritual ceremony. Chapter 1 sets up this analysis through the Nahua historian Chimalpahin Quautlehuanitzin’s exposé on the crisis of government in Chalco, a formerly powerful Nahua state at the southern edge of the valley of Mexico. Chimalpahin’s insistence that colonial authorities recognize women’s nobility prompts an investigation, in Chapter 2, of the gendered dimensions of nobility between Spanish and Nahua societies. To this end, these first two chapters advance a triangular reading of Chimalpahin’s representation of nobility alongside the Florentine Codex, a 16th century encyclopedia of life in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica, and the legal codes propagated by Alfonso X in the Siete Partidas. While Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the stakes of nobility within the colonial regime, Chapter 3 explores the chameleon-like status of the tribute women given to the conquistador Hernán Cortés during his march to Tenochtitlan in 1519. The transformation of young common women into noble brides through body paints, feathers and fine clothing enacts a deliberate dissolution of hierarchies that prefigures the crisis of government in Chalco. Alongside Spanish and Nahuatl accounts of the Conquest, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala’s visual representation of indigenous tribute gifts to Cortés anchors this exploration of Mexico’s tribute women. In Chapter 4, the maguey plant in its deified form, as the goddess Mayahuel, becomes an avatar for a transfer of wealth that flows from women’s bodies to the imperial capital. The insistence of women, however, to harvest maguey and sell its products on their own terms challenges the limitations to their mobility and appropriation of their income—an intrusion into the masculinist historiographies and imperial spaces of 16th century Mexico.PhDRomance Languages and Literatures: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133456/1/martinv_1.pd

Constructing Autism Inside and Outside the Clinic: Exploring Relationships Between Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists' and Activists' Discourses

This research investigated the construction of autism in clinical and social terrains. Study one drew from Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP) to examine the language of psychoanalytic psychotherapists in constructing the phenomenon of autism spectrum disorders. This study relied on interview data with eight experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapists using a Free Associative Narrative Interview design. The investigation of the therapists’ discourses revealed four main interpretive repertoires that organised the rhetorical agenda’s of participants. The analytic notions of interpretive repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions demonstrated how neo-liberal political frameworks influenced the therapists' negotiation of the meaning of autism. The implications of this discursive framework were subjected to a critical analysis revealing the limitations that they impose on the possible ways of being for autistic people. The second study used multimodal analysis to investigate an activist’s momentary identities on a “viral” YouTube video entitled: “In My Language” (see appendix 4). It focused on the verbal and non-verbal elements of the video material. The analytic attention predominantly settled on the interplay between the various semiotic resources that the activist utilised to negotiate a multiplicity of meanings. A wide range of identities produced by the participant’s social actions, exploring a political manifesto against the social oppression exerted on people with autism. The findings suggested that meaning-making inside this video was intricately related to the pathological language that saturates autistic lives from their beginning. This study also considered how multimodal designs of research could add to the investigations of disability and autism studies, pointing to the need to employ more autism lead research in the clinical and non-clinical sites. The findings from both studies highlighted two critical factors in autism as a discursive and multimodal phenomenon occupying a socio-cultural niche. A) Autism evolves through a conflictual and irreconcilable discursive framework. This conflict reflects profound issues of power that were taken as residing in a micro-fascism political dynamic. B) A need to break from the dichotomous deployment of autism in the current political setting is becoming apparent. The current clinical and social arrangement needs to change; a negotiation in which psychoanalytically and relationally inspired disability politics may become central. Part of this new “diplomacy” lies in engineering new discursive research designs that could offer the opportunity for the two realms to inter-relate in unforeseen and unpredictable ways

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Socio-technical gaps and social capital formation in Online Collaborative Consumption communities

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) are transforming social activities and interactions which are naturally varied and dynamic. In this process, ‘gaps’ develop between the technologies and emerging social requirements. Given that the main challenge for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is to identify and ameliorate these socio-technical gaps, it is essential to understand how individuals work and collaborate in groups, societies, and communities. The main question addressed in this study regards the identification of these gaps in the social activities of Online Collaborative Consumption (OCC). The intention is to improve user experience and design requirements to support OCC at the socio-technical design level. OCC facilitates sharing, swapping, trading, or renting products, services, and resources, via the computer-mediated interactions. Etsy, an online marketplace and community for handmade and craft goods, is the focus of this study as a community in which OCC takes place. The evaluation of online communities by using an ethnographic approach is an equally important question which this study investigates. Due to a lack of standard methods, a new combined methodological approach is proposed in this research (Predictive ethnography) and it was used in evaluation of collaborative communities to investigate the socio-technical gaps. In this approach, online ethnography complemented predictive evaluation with the aid of heuristics including sociability, usability, and user experience (UX) items. These heuristics were drawn from previous literature as the success factors for the online communities. The textual interactions from discussions of the forum and teams on Etsy that were related to these heuristics were collected and coded. Over 1000 posts from 178 threads were collected. Their frequencies were measured to demonstrate their importance, and further ethnography helped the researcher in qualitative analysis and meaning making of the textual interactions. The subsidiary question this research aims to answer is how social capital is developed in the OCC communities. Social capital is utilised as a tool to enhance the understanding of the socio-technical requirements of OCC communities and to improve the process of social capital generation. The same above-mentioned methodological approach (Predictive ethnography) was applied with the heuristics replaced by social capital measures. Over 9500 posts collected from 97 threads from the textual discussions of different Etsy teams. This study investigates the social capital formation in different types of teams such as topic-based ones that are created based on the common interest topics, and location-based ones that are created based on the shared locations of the members. In the topic-based teams, a significant amount of knowledge sharing and intellectual capital was observed. In location-based teams, most interactions were within social interactions and relational capital. The new method proposed in this research has shown its effectiveness in gaining insight from the natural discussions of the members. In total, 33 socio-technical gaps were identified and presented with possible recommendations. The most significant gaps concerned: Trust creation features; relevant rules of behaviour; clear displayed policies; and social presence tools