The purpose of the current study was to examine the effectiveness of preparatory training for mentors and proteges with respect to relationship processes and outcomes. Specifically, it was proposed that training provided to mentors and their proteges should foster a high learning goal orientation and a low avoid goal orientation. The former is associated with learning for the sake of continuous improvement and the latter is associated with a willingness to be perceived by others as having failed at a task. It was hypothesized that mentors and proteges who received goal orientation training prior to beginning their formal mentoring sessions would engage in greater feedback-seeking and would be more willing to self-disclose potentially ego-threatening information. Moreover, it was expected that training would also lead participants to expect such behaviors from their partners and as a result respond more positively when the desired behaviors were demonstrated. Eighty (i.e., first and second semester freshmen) were paired with eighty mentors (i.e., college juniors and seniors with a minimum grade point average of 3.0), resulting in a total of 160 study participants. All participants received one hour of preparatory training. A two by two factorial design was employed whereby mentors and proteges each received either goal orientation training or training simply designed to orient them to computer-mediated communication. After training, mentors and proteges met with one another using online chat for four, 30-minute weekly chat sessions. Results indicated that a) proteges in a high state of avoid goal orientation felt they received less psychosocial support the more their mentor disclosed his/her own personal downfalls, b) mentors who received goal orientation training felt they had provided greater career support the more their proteges sought feedback but the reverse was true for mentors who did not receive goal orientation training, c) mentor self-disclosure was more strongly related to their protege's self-disclosure if the protege had received goal orientation training, and finally d) mentor and protege perceptions of the psychosocial and career support that had been provided/received during online sessions were more strongly correlated if the two had received the same type of preparatory training (especially if both received goal orientation training).

No description available.

Because distance learning (DL) programs provide students educational opportunities with minimal restrictions on location and/or time, the number of institutions that provide DL courses has grown at a tremendous rate over recent years and is projected to increase in the future. Foreign language courses through DL, however, have been criticized for limited opportunities to engage in speaking activities and to develop oral proficiency. While previous research consistently reports no significant differences, the focus of those studies has been the comparison of outcomes assessments between face-to-face and DL courses. This study analyzed the types of interactions that occurred in the virtual foreign language classroom while using asynchronous audio-based CMC, known as voice boards, to learn Spanish at a rural community college located in Southwestern Virginia, Patrick Henry Community College (PHCC). An embedded multiple-case study design and computer mediated discourse analysis were applied with activity theory to analyze the interactions holistically. During a 10-year period, the amount of students enrolled in on-line only courses or in the virtual campus at PHCC increased from 97 students in the summer 2001 session to 655 students in the summer 2011 session. These results showed a 575.3% (n = 558) increase of students enrolled in DL. Only 37.7% (n = 507) of the students attending the community college during the summer 2011 session were enrolled in only FTF courses. These increases were a result of students' needs to pursue degrees of higher education while working and taking care of family and other personal obligations. Students enrolled in the SPA 101: Beginning Spanish I course explained that employment schedules, family obligations, and financial reasons motivated their decisions for taking a DL course. When completing audio-based discussion board assignments, experimentation with the language was observed and participants took advantage of opportunities to listen to recordings multiple times before submitting responses. Forty-seven percent of the utterances were categorized as containing questions to encourage continued discussion. However, lexical chains for those utterances showed that only 11.6% (n = 11) of the utterances followed a three link chain of initial post-response-response (IRR) that represented extended conversations in the voice boards. / Ph. D.

From images of distance education (DE) in advertisements to examples of extant DE theory and practice, and finally to a possible dystopia and utopia for DE, this dissertation investigates the rich representations at the intersection of feminism, pragmatism, and web based distance education. It is composed of three parts. The first part is the construction of a feminist-pragmatic theoretical and analytical tool, motivated by images of DE in commercial advertisements. These images include control of nature (and the natural body), gendered experience, transactions of bodies and tools, loss of bodies, and atomic individualism. In response to these images, the main unifying theme of the tool is organic holism where the world as a dynamic system connects with culture, biology, history, and context. It draws heavily on the work of John Dewey, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, Shannon Sullivan, Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Carolyn Merchant in order to form a rich weaving useful to instructional technologists and philosophers of education. The second part explores three examples of extant web based distance education using this tool. Lastly, I explore alternatives to current instantiations of distance education including a dystopia and a melioristic option that I call sustainable technology. / Ph. D.

Touch is an expressive and powerful modality in affect conveyance. A simple touch like a hug can elicit strong feelings of affection both in the touch initiator and recipient. Therefore delivering touch over a distance to a long-distance family member or significant other has been an appealing concept for both researchers and designers. However compared to the development of audio, video channels which allow the transmission of voice, facial expression and gesture, digitally mediated touch (Remote Touch) has not received much attention. We believe that this is partially due to the lack of understanding of the capabilities and communication possibilities that remote touch brings. This dissertation presents a review of relevant psychological and sociological literature of touch and proposes a model of immediacy of the touch channel for affect conveyance. We advance three hypotheses regarding the possibility of remote touch in immediate affect conveyance: presence, fidelity and context. We posit that remote touch with relatively low touch fidelity can convey meaningful immediate affect when it is accompanied by a contextualizing channel. To test the hypothesis, two sets of remote touch devices are designed and prototyped which allow users to send/receive a squeeze on the upper arm to/from others effectively. Three in-lab user studies are conducted to investigate the role of remote touch in affect conveyance. These studies showed clearly that remote touch, when contextualized, can influence the affective component in communication. Our results demonstrated that remote touch can afford a rich spectrum of meanings and affects. Three major categories of the usage are identified as positive affect touch which serves to convey affects such as affection, sympathy and sharing, comfort etc., playful touch which serves to lighten the conversations, and conversational touch which serves to regulate the dynamics in the discourse. Our interview results also provide insights of how people use this new channel in their communication. / Ph. D.

This study examines collective identity, a concept that is used in social movement theory to understand why people are motivated to participate in social movements and social movement groups. Collective identity is a social-psychological process that links the individual to the group through a series of group interactions that revolve around social movement activity. This is a qualitative study that examines collective identity in an online social movement group and an offline social movement group. Reports from the two groups are compared to see what variation exists between these two different groups. This research is one of the first examinations of collective identity outside of conventional face-to-face group settings. The research presented in this thesis demonstrates the difficulty a social movement group that exists online might have in generating a collective identity because of an absence of face-to-face interaction. / Master of Science

This study replicated a common experiment, the Desert Survival Problem, and attempted to add data to the body of knowledge for deception cues. Participants wrote truthful and deceptive essays arguing why items salvaged from the wreckage were useful for survival. Cues to deception considered here fit into four categories: those caused by a deceivers' negative emotion, verbal immediacy, those linked to a deceiver's attempt to appear truthful, and those resulting from deceivers' high cognitive load. Cues caused by a deceiver's negative emotions were mostly absent in the results, although deceivers did use fewer first-person pronouns than truth tellers. That indicated deceivers were less willing to take ownership of their statements. Cues because of deceivers' attempts to appear truthful were present. Deceivers used more words and more exact language than truth tellers. That showed an attempt to appear truthful. Deceivers' language was simpler than that of truth tellers, which indicated a higher cognitive load. Future research should include manipulation checks on motivation and emotion, which are tied to cue display. The type of cue displayed, be it emotional leakage, verbal immediacy, attempts to appear truthful or cognitive load, might be associated with particular deception tasks. Future research, including meta-analyses, should attempt to determine which deception tasks produce which cue type. Revised file, GMc 5/28/2014 per Dean DePauw / Master of Arts

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur stor erfarenhet svenska studenter har av, och hur stor rädsla de har för, nättroll. Ett annat syfte var att undersöka om erfarenheten har ett samband med deras eventuella rädsla för nättroll. Studien ämnar även undersöka vad svenska studenter har för definition av nättroll. Datainsamlingen utgjordes av en elektronisk enkät bestående av en självkonstruerad Likertskala (Troll-Likert) som distribuerades via webbplattformen survey & report. Skalan har aldrig tidigare använts i annat forskningssyfte. Deltagarantalet var 93 studenter. För att undersöka och analysera resultatet användes såväl kvantitativ som kvalitativ metod. Till den kvantitativa delen användes Spearmans rangkorrelationskoefficient och en enkel regressionsanalys. I fråga om den kvalitativa delen användes tematisk analys enligt Braun och Clarke (2006). Resultatet av studien visade att studenterna både hade en hög erfarenhet och rädsla för nättroll. Regressionsanalysen resulterade i ett värde på r2= 0,120. Spearmans resultat visade på en signifikant korrelation mellan rädsla och erfarenhet och regressionslinjen visade att studenternas rädsla kan till 12% förklaras av deras erfarenhet. Den tematiska analysen resulterade i ett tema som sammanfattar respondenternas definitioner av nättroll: personer som provocerar fram reaktioner för nöjes skull. / The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Swedish students have experience of, and / or fear of, online trolls. Also, if there was a connection between them two. The study also intended to investigate what definition of online trolls Swedish students had. The data collection was made up of an electronic questionnaire consisting of a self-designed Likert scale (Troll-Likert) distributed via the web survey & report. The questionnaire has never been used for any other research purposes. The number of participants was 93 students. To investigate the results both a quantitative and a qualitative method were used. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient and a regression analysis were used as in the quantitative method and a thematic analysis according to Braun and Clarke (2006) was used in the qualitative method. The study showed that the students both had a high experience and fear of online trolls. The regression analysis resulted in a value of r2 = 0.120. Spearman's results showed a significant correlation between fear and experience and the regression line showed that the students' fear can be explained to 12% by their experience. The thematic analysis resulted in one theme which summarizes the respondents' definitions of online trolls: people who provoke reactions for pleasure

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre, and Dance / Nicole M. Laster / Goffman (1959) suggests that it is through communication that we are able to form impressions of self and express our identity to society. With the emergence of computer-mediated communication and social network sites we’ve witnessed a new form of communication online, and as a result, the traditional forms of impression management used to construct and display identity have shifted to include not just speaking or writing our identity, but displaying who we are through photographs online. This research investigates the connection between the use of a particular social network site, Facebook, and the pattern of impression management techniques through the management and addition of photographs on the site. A two-month ethnography of 16 participants was conducted followed by 3 interviews. Results indicate that digital natives (individuals who have grown up heavily in the presence of technology) tend to convey a variety of conflicting online identities through images, resulting in a “no consequences” generation that, while concerned with privacy, are more concerned with communicating an impression that fits within their primary social roles.

The purpose of this study is to gain in-depth knowledge of how the members of online communities form impressions of organisations that use online communities in their communication activities. Online impression formation has its peculiarities and in order to succeed companies need to better understand this phenomenon. In order to appreciate and evaluate an interaction, those involved in it must know their own identity. Hence, individuals as well as companies engage in identity production by trying to project a favourable impression. The process of identity production can take place in both the offline and the online world. This study focuses on the online world, more specifically on online communities, by investigating how online community members form impressions of companies that produce their identities in online communities. Technology has changed customer behaviours dramatically. People have embraced the Internet to meet and interact with one another. This behaviour is in line with the postmodern assumption that there is a movement towards re-socialisation. Online communication platforms connect people globally and give them the possibility to interact and form online social networks. These platforms are interactive, and thus change the traditional way of communication. Companies therefore have to embrace those interactive ways of communication. In the online world consumers are quick to react to communication weaknesses. Inappropriate corporate communication activities can affect the image they have formed of the company in question.