Social Presence and Online Video

I was at the Association for Educational and Communication Technology's annual conference this week I had the joy of meeting up with a group of my cohort and several of my professors face-to-face. It was a great time of hanging out together.

One of my faculty sponsors has done quite a lot of research in the field of social presence in online courses. I'm thankful that I have the chance to learn from and work with him, and I am especially thankful that I got to meet up with Dr. Lowenthal in person this week and hear one of his presentation at the conference. His passion and knowledgeability about his research area were inspiring!

Dr. Lowenthal doing his thing.

I am torn on my dissertation topic. I'm sure it will be either examining social presence in online learning or preparing pre-service teachers for the demands of technology integration, but between these two topics there is quite a bit of room. I was in sessions this week related to both of these topics, and I was hoping to gain clarity, but I'm still struggling a bit. I will say that after hearing Dr. Lowenthal's presentation, I feel myself pulled toward examining social presence at least in the short term, if not for a long term project like my dissertation, or at least for a future research topic after this degree is completed.

Here is a link to the slides from this presentation, which was all about social presence and online video. Maybe this gives a glimpse into why I find this so fascinating? (Or maybe you'll be left saying, "whatever, Dave...") :-)

AECT 2014 social presence and video from Patrick Lowenthal