WHEN: Friday, March 22, 2013, 8:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
WHERE: TBA
Followed by a free luncheon for participants at TBA.

SMC graduate students are encouraged to submit a paper of their completed or in-progress scholarly work. Examples may include:

• papers involving original research or critical literature reviews that were written for a class
• research proposals
• completed research papers not yet presented at a conference

Submissions will be blind-reviewed by MMC faculty and invited reviewers. Criteria for judging will include: originality of research, contribution to the field, theoretical and methodological soundness, clarity and organization. All MMC students are expected to attend the forum. Cash prizes will be awarded. Each student may submit only one paper. Submissions must include a 100-word abstract and a cover sheet with the submitter’s name, phone number, email address and mailing address. The author’s name must not appear anywhere else on the paper.

Please submit a digital version of your paper by Friday, January 25, 2013, as an email attachment to Andy Mendelson at amendels@temple.edu.

2013 Graduate Research Forum Committee

Andy Mendelson, JOUR; Hector Postigo, MSP; Brooke Duffy, ADV; Carrie Isard, MMC student

Temple University was the site of Presence Live 2012, an annual conference hosted by the International Society for Presence Research (ISPR).

“Presence, short for telepresence, happens when people use technology and overlook at least part of its role in the experience, as when a telepresence conferencing system makes us feel as if we’re face-to-face,” explains Temple School of Media and Communication Associate Professor Matthew Lombard, president of ISPR.

Lombard was one of the first to identify presence through his graduate work at Stanford University. He wrote “At the heart of it all: The concept of presence” with Theresa Ditton, MMC ’97, in 1997, a work that has been cited by many scholars.

Researchers have identified two types of presence—spatial and social.

Through spatial presence, people experience the illusion that they are actually in a virtual environment. However, more and more attention is now being focused on social presence, “the illusion that the people and avatars and characters you see, hear and interact with via technology are real and really there with you,” Lombard says. “And that’s arguably the more important kind of presence for us to understand, as SMS, social media, Skype, tablets and high-end telepresence products like Cisco’s increasingly offer people almost any way of interacting with people that they want. We need to understand what characteristics of these technologies, and their users and uses, drive those choices.”

A panel on social presence was awarded the conference’s top paper award: “Considerations for Social Presence Theory, Research and Application in the 21st Century,” with Paul Skalaki, David Westerman and Stephanie Kelly of Cleveland State University.

As part of the conference, attendees toured several presence sites around Philadelphia, including Temple University’s Virtual Environment and Postural Orientation Laboratory, where they experienced “The Cave.”

Watch this video to learn more about the conference and one of the ways presence plays a role at Temple.

video by Ryan Geffert

They are:

Nora Alter (FMA)
Undrahbuyan Baasanjav (BTMM)
Chris Cagle (FMA)
Deborah Cai (STR)
John Edward Campbell (BTMM)
Roderick Coover (FMA)
Fabienne Darling-Wolf (JOUR)
Jan Fernback (BTMM)
Renee Hobbs (BTMM)
Tom Jacobson (BTMM)
Carolyn Kitch (JOUR)
John Lent (BTMM)
Matthew Lombard (BTMM)
Michael Maynard (ADV)
Andrew Mendelson (JOUR)
Nancy Morris (BTMM)
Patrick Murphy (BTMM)
Priscilla Murphy (STR)
Donnalyn Pompper (STR)
Hector Postigo (BTMM)
Cornelius B. Pratt (STR)
Michael Ryan (FMA)
Timo Saari (BTMM)

To find out more about MMC, please visit the program’s website and subscribe to its free listserv.

• Our pedagogy (Teaching Communication) course will be available to first-year students as well as second- and third-year students
• First-year students can take electives in addition to the core required courses
• MMC can offer two electives rather than one each semester
• Second- and third-year students have more variety and depth in their coursework