Scholars across many disciplines have grappled with questions of what it means for a person to be and interact online. Who are we when we go online? How do others know we are there and how do they perceive us? Within the context of online learning, scholarly questions tend to reflect more specific concerns focused on how well people can learn in a setting limited to mediated interactions lacking various communication cues. For example, how can a teacher and students come to know each other if they cannot see each other? How can they effectively understand and communicate with each other if they are separated by space and, in many instances, time? These concerns are related to issues of social presence and identity, both of which are complex, multi-faceted, closely interrelated constructs

Dennen, Vanessa P.

Lowenthal, Patrick R.

English

Boise State University - ScholarWorks

Boise State UniversityScholarWorksEducational Technology Faculty Publications andPresentations Department of Educational Technology8-1-2017Social Presence, Identity, and Online LearningResearch: Research Development and NeedsPatrick R. LowenthalBoise State UniversityVanessa P. DennenFlorida State UniversityThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, in Distance Education on August 2017,available online at: 10.1080/01587919.2017.1335172Social Presence, Identity, and Online Learning Research:Research Development and NeedPatrick LowenthalBoise State UniversityVanessa P. DennenFlorida State UniversityScholars across many disciplines have grappled with questions of what it means for a person to be and interact online.Who are we when we go online? How do others know we are there and how do they perceive us? Within the contextof online learning, scholarly questions tend to reflect more specific concerns focused on how well people can learn ina setting limited to mediated interactions lacking various communication cues. For example, how can a teacher and students come to know each other if they cannot see each other? How can they effectively understand andcommunicate with each other if they are separated by space and, in many instances, time? These concerns are relatedto issues of social presence and identity, both of which are complex, multi-faceted, closely interrelated constructs.Social PresenceThe theory of social presence dates back to the work of Short, Williams, and Christie (1976) in the 1970s. Short et al.(1976), like many still today, were interested in how media influences how people communicate. They believed thatsome media were better at establishing the quality or state of being “there” than other media. Over time, though, aspeople began participating in online learning environments, online educators began questioning Short et al.’stechnologically deterministic understanding of social presence. Those early online educators were still interested inhow media influences the way people communicate but they were more interested in the ways that instructors andstudents make up for the loss of visual cues in online learning environments, that relied completely on text basedcommunication, while still being able to share who they are as “real” people.IdentityIdentity is a fluid construct, one that is negotiated both with our interaction partners and within the context in whichit is being performed (Seargeant & Tagg, 2014). We construct our identities through the stories that we tell (Deumert,2014), and that construction is a lifelong process in which we “become the narrator of our own story withoutcompletely becoming the author of our life” (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 131). In other words, we tell others who we are, butwe are not entirely in control of who we are or how others see us.Social Presence and Identity in Online LearningEstablishing one’s social presence and identity in online learning environments can be difficult due to limitedcommunication channels and transactional distance (Moore, 2007). Text-based communication is used heavily inmany online learning settings, including the ones discussed in this special issue, leaving learners to establish bothsocial presence and identity in the absence of substantial visual and aural cues. Online learners have varying degreesof social presence, based largely on how much they contribute to class; whether they are socially anonymous dependsnot on their volume of contributions but rather the degree to which they share identity cues within their coursecommunications (Christopherson, 2007).The contextual nature of identity means that people share versions of themselves in the different online settings theyencounter. Of concern to many online instructors and learners is not only the identity one shares while being presentin a class, but also the identity that is refined and developed within the class – an identity that may be focused on entryinto a profession. For example, students in a teacher education class are not just college students, but are becoming teachers. Similarly, students in an organic chemistry class may be starting to form their identities as research scientistsor physicians – or distancing themselves as they determine that their future profession will not be related to thatdiscipline.This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Distance Education, published by Routledge. Copyright restrictions may apply. doi: 10.1080/01587919.2017.13351721The Special IssueThe purpose of this special issue is to try to stimulate or reignite a conversation between scholars examining socialpresence as well as those examining the role of identity in online learning environments. This special issue pushes usto consider how online learning has developed and changed over time in terms of technology, pedagogy, andfamiliarity. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, online instructors and learners were pioneers, and relatively little wasknown about how to foster social presence in online learning environments. The communication and coursetechnologies used in early online courses were still fairly rudimentary in terms of the interactions they enabled. Overtime, though, with advancements in technology and pedagogy, coupled with increased experience of instructors andstudents communicating online, issues with social presence and identity continued to evolve.The articles in this special issue take up various such themes. By doing so they bring together researchers working inthese two areas and, in turn, various perspectives, whether focused on formal or informal learning, and whethersituated in private or public discourse contexts. In the first article in this issue Lowenthal and Snelson report on aninvestigation of how highly cited researchers define social presence. They illustrate how differently researchers definesocial presence and how this continues to change over time. They specifically found that while researchers tended todefine social presence in terms of the behaviors one uses (e.g., immediacy behaviors) and/or the degree to which oneperceives another person(s) as being a ‘real’ person (and to a lesser degree, ‘there’), about 20% of the time researchersin highly cited articles defined social presence more in terms of connection, belonging, and community. Further, theyconclude that social presence, collaboration, and community are three important, but different constructs   in the onlinelearning literature and that researchers must make a concerted effort not to confuse them.In the next article, Phirangee and Malec investigated the interrelationship between social presence, identity, andcommunity. More specifically, they focused on how some students feel disconnected or othered in online courses.Through a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews, they identified the three ways students are othered in onlinecourses--(a) professional, (b) academic, and (c) ethnic--each of which can lead to feelings of disconnection andisolation when learning online.One way that instructors attempt to address feelings of isolation is to leverage social networking platforms. In the thirdarticle in this issue, Dennen and Burner report a study of traditional college-aged students’ perceptions of usingFacebook in their coursework. They found that while a majority of students used Facebook for social purposes, moststudents were not comfortable being “friends” with their instructors on Facebook. As a result, students reported thatthey would self-censor or adjust their privacy settings to avoid context collapse between their social identities andtheir classroom identities when using Facebook as a part of their coursework.An increasing number of online educators are experimenting with using synchronous communication technologies toimprove social presence in online learning environments. In the next article, Walker reports on an investigation ofhow bilingual students used language to establish social presence and identity positions in an international context.These participants relied on both humor and cultural signs to communicate with each other as they switched betweenlanguages throughout their conversations. A sense of play and personal sharing was productively used by participantsin this study.Two of the articles examined how social presence, and specifically peer interaction, shapes identity in collaborativelearning situations. Jaber and Kennedy, like Walker, studied students in an international context, examining howstudents from four different continents experienced group work in an online program. Interviews revealed thattrustworthy social interaction was important to these students, who felt it supported them emotionally and helped themlearn. By sharing with each other, some students began to think of themselves differently. In contrast, Xie, Lu, Cheng,and Izmirli examined conflictual presence in peer-mediated online collaborative settings. Through discourse analysis,they found that tensions play an important role in the establishment of identity among students in an online class.Specifically, students may explore their own identities by contrasting them with or distancing them from classmates’ identities, and in so doing also ascribe identities to others in the class community. Together, these two articles suggestthat all types of peer interactions, whether supportive or conflictual, play an important role in student identityformation.This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Distance Education, published by Routledge. Copyright restrictions may apply. doi: 10.1080/01587919.2017.13351722Grounding their work in the Community of Inquiry framework, Maddrell, Morrison, and Watson investigated therelationship between social presence and student learning. They conducted a study with 51 graduate students in fivedistance education courses but found no relationship between the students’ perceptions of social presence and studentlearning. This finding is noteworthy given the number of studies that have assumed that social presence is necessaryfor learning to occur, and demonstrates that the relationship between social presence and learning is one that still needsexploration, for example to tease out whether there is a minimum threshold of presence that is beneficial to learningbut beyond which learning will not be enhanced.Öztok and Kehrwald bring this special issue full circle, arguing, like Lowenthal and Snelson, that the lack of clarityon how researchers define social presence is problematic. In particular they illustrate that researchers often confusewhat social presence is with what social presence does. They conclude by arguing that we should focus on the salienceof interpersonal relationships if we are to understand the relational aspects of being online.Collectively these articles show the diverse ways that educational researchers have explored social presence andidentity. They also highlight some of the nuanced concerns online educators might have in these areas. The lack of anagreed upon definition of social presence makes it difficult for researchers to build upon each other’s work and foreducators to synthesize and act upon empirical recommendations. At this time, it is safe to say that social presencewithin online courses is important, but less certain is whether educators should focus on how social presence is beingperformed versus how it is being perceived. The performance vs perception tension is apparent in the variousdefinitions of presence, and also in the many ways that social presence has been researched. In terms of identity, thesearticles make apparent that identity in an online class is much more complex than playing the general role of a studentor an instructor. Instructors should remain alert to the role that ethnicity and gender play in online settings, and thevarious ways that students might perform expertise. Additionally, at times it may be important to consider not onlythe identity that students present formally to a class, but also who students are becoming professionally, and the variouson and offline identities they are juggling concurrently with the class.Both of these areas – social presence and identity – remain relevant topics of exploration for online learningresearchers. Some of the critical work that remains to be done includes negotiating and refining the currentnomenclature and definitions related to these constructs to a point where a common language can be adopted amongeducational researchers; greater empirical exploration of the relationship between social presence and student learninggains; and generating a deeper understanding of how identity performance and development in online courses is relatedto both social presence and learning. In terms of educational practice, addressing these areas is not trivial. Educatorswill benefit from research literature that uses consistent language, as well as solid empirical evidence that bothdemonstrates the forms of social presence and identity sharing that support student learning in different distanceeducation contexts and provides guidance for facilitating social presence and fostering identity sharing and development.ReferencesChristopherson, K. M. (2007). The positive and negative implications of anonymity in Internet social interactions:“On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(6), 3038-3056. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2006.09.001Deumert, A. (2014). The performance of a ludic self on social network(ing) sites. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (Eds.),The language of social media (pp. 23-45). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Moore, M. G. (2007). Theory of transactional distance. In M. G. Moore (Ed.). Handbook of distance education (pp.89-101). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Ricoeur, P. (1986). Life: A story in search of a narrator. In M. C. Doeser & J. N. Kraay (Eds.), Facts and values:Philosophical reflections from western and non-western perspectives (pp. 121-132). Dordrecht: SpringerNetherlands.Seargeant, P., & Tagg, C. (2014). Introduction: The language of social media. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (Eds.), Thelanguage of social media (pp. 1-20). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Short, J., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1976). The social psychology of telecommunications. London: John Wiley &Sons.This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Distance Education, published by Routledge. Copyright restrictions may apply. doi: 10.1080/01587919.2017.13351723

Social Presence, Identity, and Online Learning Research: Research Development and Needs

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Social Presence, Identity, and Online Learning Research: Research Development and Needs

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