social presence
[Maybe fodder for that last chapter?:]
[Disclosure: sorry for the length of this. It turned into a generative mess. My initial press for posting this was to work out the way social presence works into network literacy. It didn't quite work out that way.]
I'm finishing my paper for the Computer Connection at Cs next week, whose title is "Cultivating Social Presence in the Computer-mediated Classroom."
When I worked up this abstract, it essentially was the skeleton of a very quick, very informal presentation that I made at a WP professional development mini-seminar for online teaching a few months back. The gist of my original presentation drew heavily from my MA thesis findings as well as some interesting research I came across by Terry Anderson, who studies distance education at Athabasca University in Edmonton.
My thesis, put simply, examined online writing conference transcripts. I found that writers' perceived "comfort" with the online medium could be linked directly to a few simple rhetorical moves on the tutor's part (I was also the tutor). For instance, when the writer and I engaged in seemingly off-topic banter at the front end of the "real" conference, the writer reported a higher comfort-level. For example, one conference began with me saying something about the Phantom of the Opera (I think I'd been listening to the soundtrack at the time), and the writer happened to be a fan, and we talked for a moment about the story and the show and etc. Another writer and I talked about our kids at the front end of the conference.
I couched my thesis findings tentatively, knowing that my study was limited and fraught with chinks (all but one of my subjects were women, for instance), but I am still convinced that there is some truth to my conclusions. Anderson's work, which is far more thorough and rigorous than my research, supports my own findings, and his methods and texts are similar. He uses textual analysis and coding to describe the rhetorical (my word, not his) moves of students and teachers in online classroom discussions to measure "social presence" and comes up with a "social presence density calculator." The higher, or more dense, the social presence in an online classroom, the more "effective" the interactions that take place in that classroom. (Effectiveness is measured primarily in terms of student satisfaction with the course, but also in assessment of student work by the teacher.)
To measure social presence density, Anderson worked up a list of rhetorical moves that students and teachers made, such as "self-disclosure," "use of humor," and "expression of emotion." A higher incidence of these particular moves resulted in a higher social presence density.
What Anderson doesn't explicitly say, though, is *how* to increase these sorts of rhetorical moves by and among the students. My argument is that the teacher must stick her neck out and approach the computer-mediated classroom with an explicit social presence rhetoric. That is, in order to create social presence in an online classroom, teachers must, to an extent, leave aside the clinical, dare-I-say stuffy, positioning that is sometimes comfortable and safe for teachers.
I've found a few other studies about online teaching that deal directly with social presence (none about specifically teaching writing + social presence yet, though). My task now is to work up a preliminary list of practices that writing teachers can use to up that social presence factor (my impression of the Computer Connection is that "practical application" is important).
In sleuthing around to find people talking about social presence [which at one point involved digging through cgb's del.icio.us posts] , I came across this presentation from lift07 by Stowe Boyd where he argues that for anything (he's talking applications, which I am trying to transfer to classroom practices for the presentation) to be successfully social, it must begin with an individual's interests/passions. That is, the social begins with individuals first. Individuals must be invested, somehow, to build the social, to connect herself, to participate in the network.
For the writing classroom, I think the implications of this theory are a bit controversial: for social presence to emerge in an online writing classroom, each individual must self-select to become a part of the community. The self-select that happens when a student signs up for a compulsory FY comp class is something different, I think, unless the FY comp course is topics-based (like Ohio State's FY comp courses in the humanities--available only to honors/AP students, incidentally) and the students choose based on interest that way. So right off the bat, our students are put into a place where the social is forced.
[BTW--here might be the connections to diss work: networked writers construct social presence that in turn constructs the network in a kind of serendipitous fashion...hm, that's going somewhere, I think, but not quite sure yet. At any rate, "social presence" is definitely part of network literacy. And it has something do to with the individual, and connections, and I don't know yet.]
So, it is the teacher's responsibility to construct some kind of investment in the student. Yes, I am saying that the teacher has to make the student CARE about the class and the other students. And to an extent, this is no different than what some might argue needs to happen in the IRL classroom. And I think I might also find teachers who eschew this "creating interest" responsibility as well. And I think we know who the more successful teachers are? Stop me if I'm assuming too much there.
But in an online space, to cultivate interest might be considered more crucial. That is, the IRL classroom enjoys the benefit of certain cultural behaviors that compel students to work and participate, like the perceived embarrassement for not turning work in on time. In an online space, this embarrassment isn't creating the compulsion to, say, do the reading for a discussion because social immediacy and intimacy are lacking.
What can we do to supplant social immediacy and intimacy? How can we cultivate spaces where students will feel comfortable [problematic term] enough to perform and participate with other students and the teacher to get the most out of the interactions? Essentially, how can we make them care or be interested?
So, here's how I'm answering this question: We can make them be interested in us, the teachers. We can make them care about us. As I write this, I know this claim is fraught with problems. But I think it makes sense, to a degree. All that business about "self-disclosure" and "humor" and "expression of emotion" as creating social presence density began with a teacher who self-disclosed, made jokes, and expressed emotion.
As teachers of writing and rhetoric, we are especially good at wooing audiences, at constructing ethos, at using the language for eliciting particular responses. The problem might be that such rhetorical moves (self-disclosure, emotion, humor) are also seen, especially in academic writing, as weaknesses or as unprofessional. These rhetorical moves are essentially the MOST important in the network of writers that I'm studying for the diss. But to try and transfer those rhetorical moves into the classroom for use by the teacher to foster interest, to construct community, might actually backfire. Hm.
At any rate, I talked myself into that corner about the backfire just now. It's not in my Cs paper (yet). What is in the Cs paper is the practical ways we might cultivate social presence for the classroom, which I think is simply a matter of letting your students really know you, or really know a constructed you, that they can care about. And so this involves working up an initial activity that requires them to talk about themselves somehow, in which you the teacher also participates. Consider using a synchronous communication app, like IM or IRC, to meet with small groups of them regularly, and situate those discussions in the most informal way possible. Think a little more carefully about your marginalia and end comments on papers. Consider keeping a course blog (if your course lives on Blackboard or WebCT) where you can reflect and synthesize (again, informally) what you see going on in the IM discussions and in the students' individual work so the students can see how their work lines up with what other students are doing and saying. Consider (and this last one will raise hackles, but I mean it) keeping a personal blog where you write about your cats specifically with your student audience in mind. This last one might appear to be "overboard," but if we consider the ways in which our personal lives come through in the conventional classroom, it really isn't as farfetched as it initially seems.
It's not what you use. It's not spending days and weeks teaching yourself involved, cutting-edge apps. It's not using Twitter, or podcasting, or putting lectures up on YouTube (though it can be all of that, too). What it IS, what cultivating social presence is, is bringing the personal and the human to the online spaces that the classroom inhabits.
As I finish this, I realize there's another scary claim I'm making here: teaching online requires a nurturing teacherly stance and cannot, for the most part, support an agonistic stance. And that might catch me some flack, too. But I'm going to go with it.