About the CRLT The CRLT has as its mission to promote and support a community of scholars dedicated to research on the design, use, and implementation of technology to improve learning. Three primary themes underlie the work at the Center: • research that contributes to the development of new pedagogical models for continuing professional development in the 21st century; • research on and evaluation of interactive distance learning environments that inform our understanding of student learning; and • research on teaching strategies for using current and emerging technologies to support student interaction, collaboration, and engagement in the issues being studied. This report is one of a series from our on-going research on learning and technology. If you have any questions or comments on this report, or if you would like to find out more about the activities of the CRLT, contact:

Emoticons are graphic representations of facial expressions that many e-mail users embed in their messages. These symbols are widely known and commonly recognized among computer-mediated communication (CMC) users, and they are described by most observers as substituting for the nonverbal cues that are missing from CMC in comparison to face-to-face communication. Their empirical impacts, however, are undocumented. An experiment sought to determine the effects of three common emoticons on message interpretations. Hypotheses drawn from literature on nonverbal communication reflect several plausible relationships between emoticons and verbal messages. The results indicate that emoticons ’ contributions were outweighed by verbal content, but a negativity effect appeared such that any negative message aspect—verbal or graphic—shifts message interpretation in the direction of the negative element.

The increased diffusion of the Internet has made computer-mediated communication (CMC) very popular. However, a difficult question arises for psychologists and communication researchers: “What are the communicative characteristics of CMC?” According to the “cues-filtered-out” approach, CMC lacks the specifically relational features (social cues), which enable the interlocutors to identify correctly the kind of interpersonal situations they find themselves in. This paper counters this vision by integrating in its theoretical frame the different psycho-social approaches available in current literature. In particular, the paper describes the characteristics of the socio-cognitive processes—emotional expression, context definition, and identity creation—used by the interlocutors to make order and create relationships out of the miscommunication processes typical of CMC. Moreover, it presents the emerging forms of CMC—instant messaging, shared hypermedia, weblogs, and graphical chats—and their possible social and communicative effects.

As mediated communication becomes an increasingly central part of everyday life, people have started going online to conduct business, to get emotional support, to find communities of interest, and to look for potential romantic partners. Most of these social activities take place primarily through the exchange of conversational texts that, over time, accrue into vast archives. As valuable as these collections of documents may be for our comprehension of the online social world, they are usually cumbersome, impenetrable records of the past. This thesis posits that history visualization- the visualization of people's past presence and activities in mediated environments- helps users make better sense of the online social spaces they inhabit and the relationships they maintain.

To support social interactions characterizing most activities in virtual communities, system design needs to go beyond functional and user-friendliness requirements to incorporate the demands for supporting social environments and activities. Social presence, as a subjective nature of communication media, reflects the perception of social actors as well as social settings and has been regarded as one of the major design principles for virtual communities. Our study explores its potential in facilitating the social identification process and promoting community participation. Drawing upon the social identity theory, we develop a model explaining the effects of social presence on social identification and community participation. An empirical study involving 430 members from four different virtual communities of interest provide strong support for our model. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

One of the unknowns of emailing is the time it will take the receiver to form and post a reply. Response times vary considerably, and the chronemics of email are an important non-verbal cue which can convey meaning as well as influence interactional coherence. While privacy and technical challenges have so far limited quantitative assessment of responsiveness chronemics, an opportunity became available with the recent release into the public domain of an unprecedentedly large corporate collection of private email messages. An analysis of over 16,000 responses extracted from a large database of email messages created by Enron employees was performed. Responsiveness profiles of individual users and of all users are described, and their aggregate temporal distribution is evaluated. The generalizability of these findings as well as their implication to current theory on email response times is discussed. 1.

Despite a growing stream of research into the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) media in higher education, there remains limited understanding about the students ’ motivations for using CMC alongside non-CMC media within a learning context. This article identifies seven dimensions of motivation from the perspective of uses and gratifications (U&G), including information seeking, convenience, connectivity, problem solving, content management, social presence, and social context cues. It was found that each CMC satisfied different motivations for its use, and that overall CMC best fulfilled information seeking, convenience, connectivity, and content management motivations. This study also identifies a number of similarities and differences between CMC and non-CMC media in terms of the motivations for their use. Finally, the study concludes with a discussion of the implications for Information Systems (IS) researchers, higher education, and organizations. KEYWORDS: Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), motivations, Uses and Gratifications

Exploring the missing wink: emoticons in cyberspace Daantje Derks

Despite a growing stream of research into the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) media in higher education, there remains limited understanding about the students ‘ motivations for using CMC alongside non-CMC media within a learning context. This article identifies seven dimensions of motivation from the perspective of uses and gratifications (U&G), including information seeking, convenience, connectivity, problem solving, content management, social presence, and social context cues. It was found that each CMC satisfied different motivations for its use, and that overall CMC best fulfilled information seeking, convenience, connectivity, and content management motivations. This study also identifies a number of similarities and differences between CMC and non-

Time related (chronemic) cues are an important component of nonverbal communication. Do they also act as nonverbal cues in computer mediated communication? 55 participants were asked to rate a job candidate described in a vignette. Candidates varied in their valence (high valence, low valence) and in their response latency to an e-mail (normative one day latency, and nonnormative latencies of two weeks, and of total silence for a month). Candidates were identical in all other respects. The results show that the normative online response latency was more expected and resulted in more positive evaluations of the candidate. Complex interactions between response latency and candidate valence were observed. The importance of response latency as a nonverbal cue in computer mediated communication is discussed.