Title: An investigation of the social presence in teachers' blogs

Authors: Jingsheng Zhang; Juan Li

Addresses: School of Communication and Technology, Liaocheng University, No. 1, Hunan Road, Liaocheng, China ' School of Communication and Technology, Liaocheng University, No. 1, Hunan Road, Liaocheng, China

Abstract: Teachers' blogs, as one type of social media, provide a solid platform for communication between teachers. This study designs a questionnaire to analyse the social presence in teachers' blogs. The result shows that the social presence in teachers' blogs is in good condition. For all the five dimensions of social presence, the mean of 'activeness' is the highest, and the means of 'truthfulness' and 'non-linguistic information' are the lowest. This study concludes that the teachers have realised good social presence in their blogs. Based on the problems found in the investigation, this study provides some strategies to enhance the social presence in teachers' blogs, such as enhancing individual teachers' social presence in teachers' blogs; increasing social presence in teachers' blogs with the support of schools; and improving the social presence in teachers' blogs by means of establishing policies.

Keywords: social software; teacher blogs; weblogs; social presence; strategy; social media; communication; teachers; education.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2013.055408

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2013 Vol.23 No.3/4, pp.336 - 344

Received: 31 Aug 2012
Accepted: 10 Feb 2013
Published online: 30 Dec 2013 *

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