Annotated Bibliography

ED11: Doctor of Education, Queensland University of Technology

Research Topic:
What technology and level of engagement are
necessary to attain telepresence?

Author:
Carol Daunt (n1006771)
Supervisors: Dr Alan Roberts & Dr Radha Iyer
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Introduction
Telepresence has traditionally been described from a technology perspective rather than the
experience that the technology enables. Steuer (1992) was the first to describe telepresence from an
experiential perspective and this notion continues to be discussed, analysed and researched. From
a review of the literature to date, it has become clear that we need to develop a deeper
understanding, both in theory and in practice, of how people interact with each other and virtual
others through communication media, that is telepresence.
This study will examine the factors contributing to the state of telepresence from an experiential
perspective. It is concerned with examining whether achieving this state is dependent upon a
particular level of technology or whether individual engagement in an activity is the major
contributing factor.
The study aims to:
1. Define telepresence
2. Examine how much technology is needed to create a telepresence experience.
3. Investigate the nature of engagement necessary for telepresence to occur.
4. Investigate the indications for teaching and learning.

Themes
Four themes have emerged from the literature to date. These are:
1. Defining Telepresence:
! History
! Definition
2. Environment:
! Videoconferencing
! Virtual Worlds
3. Engagement:
! Presence
! Social Presence
! Interactivity
! Flow
! Measurement (of levels of engagement)
4. Learning Theories:
! Constructivism
! Connectivism

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Their relationship to the Research Topic are demonstrated in the diagram below.

Literature Sources
Telepresence is an emerging concept and, as such, there is a lack of research in the area. The
following types of documents have been used to inform this study:
• journal articles
• conference papers
• books
Papers for this annotated bibliography have been chosen from the following publications:
• Book: Being There: Concepts, effects and measurement of user presence in synthetic
environments
• Book: Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies
• British Journal of Educational Technology
• Conference Paper: Learning Technologies Conference, Australia 2005
• Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology
• Educational Technology (journal)
• Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
• Journal of Communication
• Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media

Annotated Bibliography: Carol Daunt

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Reviewed Papers
Following are a selection of papers chosen for this annotated bibliography. They represent a broad
selection based on the following criteria:
• they cover all themes identified
• they are from a range of sources
• they have been written across various years from 1992 – 2007 – thus reflecting
developments in thinking in the field over the past 15 years.
NB: Not all readings undertaken to date are included in this review. The paper numbers reflect
those in the concept map. Each includes a rating for relevance to my study – 10 being highly
relevant.

Paper 1:
Steuer, J. (1992). Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. Journal of
Communication, 42(4), 73-97.
At the time of writing this article, Jonathan Steuer was a lecturer in the Department of
Communication, Stanford University. He holds a BA from Harvard University and a Ph. D. in
Communication Theory and Research from Stanford University. He is a pioneer in online
publishing and this article is widely cited in academic and industry literature.
In this paper Steuer redefines the term “virtual reality” from one centred around technology to
being in terms of presence and telepresence. Steuer (1992) contends that:
[t]elepresence is defined as the experience of presence in an environment by means of a
communication medium. In other words, "presence" refers to the natural perception of an
environment, and "telepresence" refers to the mediated perception of an environment. This
environment can be either a temporally or spatially distant "real" environment (for
instance, a distant space viewed through a video camera), or an animated but non- existent
virtual world synthesized by a computer (for instance, the animated "world" created in a
video game). (p. 6)
Steuer suggests two dimensions that contribute to telepresence, vividness and interactivity.
Vividness means the representational richness of a mediated environment as defined by its formal
features, that is, the way in which an environment presents information to the senses. Interactivity
is defined as the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a
mediated environment in real time.
He conjectures that vividness and interactivity are both positively related to telepresence; that is,
the more vivid and the more interactive a particular environment is, the greater the sense of
presence evoked by that environment. Steuer’s vividness and interactivity matrix from this paper
has been particularly influential in shaping the discourse by defining virtual reality in terms of
human experience, rather than technological hardware, and setting out vividness and interactivity
as axial dimensions of that experience.
Steuer (1992) is highly relevant to my study as this paper goes beyond telepresence as
technological and explores it as experiential. Steuer’s dimensions of vividness and interactivity
may provide a basis for measurement of telepresence experiences in my study. There are links to a
number of important studies and papers of the time. The only shortcoming on this paper is that it

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was written in 1992 – long before many of the recent ICT developments and the emergence of the
new media systems. Relevance: 10

Paper 2:
Ijsselsteijn, W., & Riva, G. (2003). Being there: The experience of presence in mediated
environments. In G. Riva, F. Davide, & W. Ijsselsteijn (Eds.) Being there: Concepts, effects and
measurement of user presence in synthetic environments (pp. 3-16). Ios Press, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
Wijnand Ijsselsteijn is an Associate Professor within the Human-Technology Interaction Group,
Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology in The
Netherlands. Since 1996, he has worked on the scientific investigation of how humans interact
with advanced media technologies and is specifically interested in how to conceptualise and
measure the human experience in relation to media. Giuseppe Riva, Ph.D., is Associate Professor
of Communication Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan and Head Researcher of the
Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Laboratory.
This paper is the first chapter of a book, which attempts to help designers and researchers develop
a better understanding of how a real sense of presence can be achieved. In this chapter, Ijsselsteijn
and Riva discuss different types of presence; including physical presence, social presence and co-
presence. They investigate presence in terms of ‘point of view’ and ‘self perception’, and make the
point that presence is not intrinsically bound to any specific type of technology but is a product of
the mind. As such, it is highly likely that the presence experience will vary significantly across
individuals, based on differences in perceptual-motor abilities, mental states, traits, needs,
preference and experience.
The authors assert that a measure of presence that is reliable, valid and robust is an essential tool
in designing and evaluating media from a user-centred perspective, but contend that, despite
considerable progress in investigating several candidate measurement methodologies, a reliable
tool remains one of the main research challenges of the field. In making this assertion, they
examine the factors used by several researchers in an attempt to measure presence.
Ijsselsteijn and Riva overview the research of a number of authors in the area of presence and
conclude that experiencing presence requires the reproduction of the physical features of external
reality; the possibility of interaction and free action, and the creation and sharing of the cultural
meaning amongst people and objects populating the environment. This paper is highly relevant to
my study in providing a basis for examining what telepresence is, and containing many valuable
references to work in the field. Relevance: 9

Paper 3:
Jonassen, D. (1994). Thinking technology: Toward a constructivist design model. Educational
Technology, 34(4), 34-37.
At the time of writing, Jonassen was a Professor of Instructional Systems at the Pennsylvania State
University. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Education in the School of Information
Science and Learning Technologies, Educational Psychology Program, University of Missouri-
Columbia. Jonassen is a well-published and respected academic in the field of learning as it
intersects with technology. This paper was written when constructivism was a relatively new
concept to the field of instructional systems and explains the place of constructivism in designing
learning.

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Jonassen discusses the concept of constructivism as being where learners construct their own
reality (or at least interpret it) based upon their perceptions of experiences. He then examines this
in the light of designing learning environments that foster constructivist learning as opposed to
controlling the processing of the learner. Three common attributes are presented: context,
collaboration, construction; and Jonassen suggests that these attributes should exist in all learning
environments. A Web of Constructivism is presented that centres around these three attributes
and attempts to capture the inter-relationships between the attributes themselves and the various
elements of which each is comprised.
This paper is an attempt at simplifying the constructivist theory in terms of learning environments
and Jonassen has written more in-depth on the subject since 1994. It is worthwhile as an
introduction to the subject, however more would be gained from reading the later works of
Jonassen, in the light of this paper, in order to examine how his thinking on the topic developed.
Relevance: 5

Paper 4:
Insko, B. E. (2003). Measuring presence: Subjective, behavioral and physiological methods. In
G. Riva, F. Davide, & W. Ijsselsteijn (Eds.) Being there: Concepts, effects and measurement of user
presence in synthetic environments (pp. 110-118). Ios Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Brent Insko is a researcher in the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina.
This paper is a chapter of a book, which attempts to help designers and researchers develop a
better understanding of how a real sense of presence can be achieved. In this chapter, Insko
addresses the issue of how to determine the extent to which a user feels present in the virtual
environment and examines three categories of methods commonly used for measuring presence;
their use in the field, their advantages and disadvantages.
Insko identifies that the definition of presence has yet to be agreed upon by researchers, and
identifies two definitions of presence that are most often discussed in the literature, these being 1)
the sense of being in a place even when one is physically situated in another place; and 2) the
“perceptual illusion of nonmediation” where a participant experiences presence, when he or she
fails to perceive or acknowledge that the environment is being presented through some type of
media. He points out that the lack of a single accepted definition leads to difficulty in quantifying a
participant’s presence.
Insko overviews several existing measures of presence:
• Subjective measures based on post-immersion questionnaires that rely on self-assessment
by the user.
• Behavioural measures that examine actions or manners exhibited by the user that are
responses to objects or events in the virtual environment.
• Physiological methods that attempt to measure presence by gauging changes in the
subject's heart rate, skin temperature, skin conductance, breathing rate, etc.
He then compares these methods based on the criteria of reliability, validity, objectivity, and
sensitivity and recommends that the researcher use as many methods as is feasible so that it is less
likely that any differences in presence between two conditions will be missed. Insko believes that
most of the time, a questionnaire will be appropriate for use in measuring presence in an
experiment.

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Insko’s paper is a comprehensive overview of presence measurement tools and methods and their
advantages and disadvantages. It is an excellent starting point for further, in-depth study of the
various methodologies and will be an important resource for my study. Relevance: 9

Paper 6:
Montgomery, H., Sharafi, P., & Hedman, L. R. (2004). Engaging in activities involving
information technology: Dimensions, modes, and flow. Human Factors: The Journal of the
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 46(2), 334-348.
Henry Montgomery is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University.
Parvaneh Sharafi is a Research Associate in the Department of Learning, Informatics,
Management, and Ethics at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. Leif Hedman is an Associate
Professor in the Department of Psychology at Umeh University. The primary audience for this
paper are psychologists, engineers, designers, and scientists; all of whom have a common interest
in designing systems and equipment to be safe and effective for the people who operate and
maintain them.
The authors explore the concept of engagement mode, which has been used for describing general
properties of people's activities in relation to the external world. In this context engagement modes
are considered in relation to how people perceive qualities of their interaction with information
technology (IT). The paper specifies three dimensions that define different engagement modes in
interaction with IT (evaluation, control, motivation) and relates each dimension to the flow
experience. (Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory determined two factors in relation to achieving ‘flow’:
the subject's skill and the challenge of the activity in which the subject is engaged.)
Montgomery et al. describe a study in which they developed a questionnaire purporting to lead to
a model of engagement modes in relation to IT and related this to flow experience. They
constructed a questionnaire to gauge the components of pleasure, control, concentration, exploring
and challenge in 300 subjects. The results are reported in considerable depth in both psychological
and statistical terms.
The paper by Montgomery et al. is an in-depth study of engagement modes and examines this
concept with a psychological bias that is too complex for my study. However, the early part of the
paper contains some good underpinning information about the notion of engagement and
interaction with IT. Relevance: 6

Paper 10:
Barbatsis, G. S. (1999). Hypermediated telepresence: Sensemaking aesthetics of the newest
communication art. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 43(2), 280-298.
Barbatsis is an Associate Professor of Telecommunication at Michigan State University. Her
research focuses on pictorial communication, with particular emphases in the visual aesthetics of
mediated communication and visual literacy. The audience for this paper is those working in the
field of new media, in particular hypermedia, which is a combination of 2-D and 3-D graphics with
the ability for interaction amongst participants.
Barbatsis addresses the issue that research which focuses on distinctions among technologies
rather than on distinctions about the experiences that technologies create has prevented treating
the emergent concepts of hypermedia as qualities of communication. She cites several scholars
who link a technology driven approach with theoretical inadequacies regarding issues of
interactivity, and presents other supporting arguments maintaining that qualities of interpersonal
engagement are not explained simply as mediated versions of everyday, face-to-face interaction.

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In this paper Barbatsis reports in depth on a visual field analysis that was carried out to address
the "sensory world" or the "experiential environment" of mediated communication. She isolated a
set of perceptual qualities of space and time as formal features of hypermedia: amalgamation,
contingency, graphication, fragmentation and synaesthesia. Barbatsis makes clear that the method
of visual field analysis does not provide answers as to whether or not these qualities are properties
reflected in the cognitive and affective mental mappings of hypermedia experiences but that the
method merely lays the groundwork for further investigation.
This paper by Barbatsis deals with the topic of experiencing technology in a depth that is beyond
the scope of my study, however it informs the research process. Relevance: 6.

Paper 11:
Shin, N. (2006). Online learner's "flow" experience: An empirical study. British Journal of
Educational Technology, 37(5), 705-720.
Namin Shin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Education, Dongguk University in
Seoul. In this paper Shin is concerned with the issue of engagement in online learning through the
lens of Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ theory.
Over the last ten years, Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory has been widely applied to various fields
of study dealing with issues of technology and human learning. In this study, Shin put forward a
flow model with regard to virtual class environment in a traditional university context. The virtual
course was purely online with no face-to-face sessions provided, but students could take part in
virtual lectures through video-on-demand (VOD). Based on the model, a virtual-course flow
measure (VFM) was developed and administered to 525 undergraduate students engaged in
virtual classes in order to examine the empirical relationships between measured flow antecedents,
flow experiences and flow consequence-course satisfaction in this case.
This paper gives a useful overview and definition of flow theory (people in flow can be depicted,
in general, as being intrinsically motivated, interested in challenging tasks at hand, being
unconscious of themselves while performing the tasks, feeling a unity between consciousness and
activities, and oftentimes losing the sense of physical time) and discusses various ways of
garnering empirical data on flow. Telepresence is one of the flow experiences (refer Fig. 1 p. 708)
and one of the subconstructs in the VFM, which was developed to gauge the extent to which
individual students experience the subjective state of flow (refer Table 1 p. 710).
In the VFM, telepresence is defined as the extent to which one feels present in an environment
mediated by communication media, to be determined by ‘vividness’ and ‘interactivity’. It provides
five measures of telepresence which are drawn from the work of Steuer (1993):
• While watching VOD, I adjust the volume or the screen size.
• I remember vividly the way in which the contents were presented on screen.
• I screen the contents and go directly to the part I need within the table of contents of the
lecture.
• I go over every piece of information put on the screen.
• I have a clear memory of the instructor’s voice even after the class is over.
The findings show that: (1) students’ perceptions of their level of ‘skill’ and ‘challenge’ specific to
each course are critical to determining the level of flow, (2) flow is a significant predictor of course
satisfaction and (3) other than flow, individual differences such as ‘gender’ and ‘having a clear
goal’ can make a significant difference in the level of flow in a virtual course.

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Shin addresses three questions that may be useful in framing my own questions. How would the
experience be conceptualised? What factors would lead learners to be in or out of flow? What
impact would the flow experience have on online learning?
The only limitation in this paper is that it reports numerous quantitative statistics but doesn’t
discuss the implications of these in depth. This paper could form the basis of measurement of
levels of engagement in my study – the statistics could be the starting point for my research. Shin
identifies that more research is needed to link the flow and learning. Relevance: 8

Paper 12:
Debbabi, S., & Baile, S. (2005). Creating telepresence in virtual mediated environments. In D.
Subhasish (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies (pp. 73-77). Idea Group,
Inc.
Sana Debbabi is a doctoral student and Serge Baile is a Professor at the Centre de recherche en
gestion at IAE-Université Toulouse, France. This paper is a chapter in a book designed to provide a
compendium of terms, definitions and explanations of concepts, processes and acronyms, and
which features short articles authored by leading experts offering an in-depth description of key
terms and concepts related to different areas, issues and trends in information science and
technologies.
Debbabi and Baile explain that a number of emerging technologies, including video conferencing,
are designed to enable the user to experience a sense of being present in a mediated virtual
environment i.e. telepresence. They propose that telepresence should be considered as a facet of
presence in a mediated virtual environment and refer to a number of applications for telepresence,
including the expanded distance learning options that it makes available. As other authors cited in
this bibliography have done, they note that despite the centrality and importance of telepresence, it
has not yet been carefully defined and explicated.
The authors review several conceptualisations of telepresence and presence in literature, review
telepresence determinants, and outline the main methods commonly used for measuring
telepresence. As did Insko (2003), they examine the main methods being used to measure presence
in subjective and objective terms, and outline the weaknesses in each method. They conclude the
paper by questioning whether telepresence is necessarily a good thing and why we so strongly
desire a sense of telepresence.
This paper presents another view on telepresence, but as a short piece, it adds little to the debate.
More is to be gained from Insko’s paper (2003). Relevance: 5

Paper 17:
Wheeler, S. (2005). Creating social presence in digital learning environments: A presence of
mind? Paper presented at Learning Technologies Conference, Australia.
Steve Wheeler is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Information Technology, University of
Plymouth and is currently working toward a Ph.D. by publication. This paper supported a
conference presentation in which the audience were educational practitioners using learning
technologies to support their teaching and learning programs.
In this paper Wheeler argues that social presence is an important feature of any successful learning
activity, particularly within digital learning environments (DLEs). He discusses the view of Short,
Williams & Christie (1976) of social presence being the perception that one is communicating with
people rather than with inanimate objects, despite being located in different places where all

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communication is digitally mediated and also the view of Tu (2002) that social presence can be
defined in terms of a combination of social relationships, communication styles, task analyses,
feedback levels and measures of immediacy.

Wheeler conducted a study to test whether technologies yielded different affordances to support
social presence. Social presence was measured in face-to-face, telephone, email and
videoconferencing environments. The measurement tools included Entwistle’s Approaches to
Study Inventory (1981) and two instruments created by the author to measure student support
needs and communication mode perceptions. From this study, Wheeler offers recommendations
on how to build social presence into DLEs, although his discussion is limited to the asynchronous
communication tools and doesn’t offer any recommendations for videoconferencing.
This short paper is highly relevant to my study as it includes videoconferencing as one of the
environments in which social presence was measured and it offers some measurement tools for
this task. A closer examination of Wheeler’s work is recommended. Relevance: 8

Paper 18:
Nippard, E., & Murphy, E. (2007). Social presence in the web-based synchronous secondary
classroom. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 33(1), 119-129.
Nippard is an E-teacher with the Center for Distance Learning and Innovation, Stephenville, NL.
Murphy is an Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, Memorial University, St. John's,
Newfoundland. This paper was written for an audience of teachers who are using, or interested in
the use of, technology for learning.
Nippard and Murphy provide a conceptual framework for social presence and distinguish it from
interactivity, which can be task-oriented and occur with content as well as with others and may
indicate a level of social presence but doesn’t necessarily mean that presence has been established.
They report on a study designed to explore how teachers and students manifest social presence in
the web-based synchronous secondary classroom. Their data collection techniques relied on
observations of recorded class sessions in six courses at two different stages of the year and
represented a cross section of classes from the three levels of schooling in the high school system in
their State.
Of interest in the findings of this study is that the manifestation of social presence by the teachers
was quite different to that of students. Where teachers achieved social presence through the use of
two-way audio, students relied on text-based messaging, similar to chat or instant messaging.
Nippard and Murphy provide an avenue for consideration in my study of the telepresence
learning environment i.e. the different manifestations of social presence between teachers and
students. However, the paper has little further value in my study. Relevance: 5

Conclusion
The literature included in this annotated bibliography has provided a basis for determining the
approach of this writer’s study into telepresence. The review of literature has highlighted the lack
of research into the “experience” of telepresence as opposed to the equipment used and showed
that there is not a shared definition of telepresence. It has also brought to light an area of
investigation that will be an important element in the writer’s study, that of social presence. This
has been just the beginning of the search for relevant literature and each of the topics in the
concept map will be investigated in further detail. Establishing a definition of telepresence as it is
to be used in this study is a significant priority.

Annotated Bibliography: Carol Daunt