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COVID-19 has prompted conferences to transition to online formats, inadvertently diminishing their emphasis on the social element. In online events, a sense of presence leading to a sense of companionship is limited in conventional conferencing platforms. Although the extant body of research on virtual conferences is growing, academic events in the Metaverse get little attention. Such events and their relevance to social presence within the Metaverse and associations among observable factors are seldom discussed. This study examined the perspectives of scholars in an online seminar during COVID-19 hosted in Gather.Town, a Metaverse-like conferencing environment. A hypothetical model was built to determine whether social presence and technology self-efficacy impact scholars' satisfaction and facilitate academic interactions. Ninety-three scholars in an academic seminar for research projects in information and computer education were polled to obtain data, which was then evaluated using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The proposed model explained 57.1 percent of the variables, and the findings showed that social presence and technology self-efficacy had a positive and significant impact on academic interactions and exchanges, as well as technology self-efficacy playing an essential role in determining overall satisfaction. However, social presence does not appear to have a direct impact on satisfaction, implying that a positive academic experience may still be achieved with or without the feature of being with others supported by the Metaverse. Although digital communication will only become more diverse and intense, it is important to understand how to maintain the basic character of human interactions virtually, even amid a pandemic. This research attempts to shed light on some critical factors in creating a conducive environment for future Metaverse-like academic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In a Taiwan-France telecollaborative project, Beyond These Walls , we designed a self-introduction activity to facilitate connective affordance between two groups of learners. Participants selected three objects – representing their past, present, and future – to their intercultural partners. Students prepared PowerPoint files and text documents to post on a project website. Participants then read, commented on, and asked/answered questions about the postings. To understand how the participants presented and positioned themselves during the processes of forming connectivity, the object descriptions and interactive postings were collected. Bakhtin’s (1986; 1981) conceptions of audience and addressivity and the social presence theory of Gunawardena (1995) were used to analyze the data. Our findings suggest that objects reflected the participants' identities and personas, which helped to create a sense of physical presence that is frequently lacking in online communication. The acts of selecting, describing, reading, and discussing objects of personal significance were conducive to participants' awareness of one another's identities and shaped the perceptions of their interlocutors as authentic, identifiable individuals with whom interpersonal communication was possible. Based on these findings, we discuss the importance of identity and how identity construction strategies foster social presence that is essential in telecollaborative settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the influence of national culture on trust development of virtual community members across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The research extends trust research by employing trust tendency, privacy policy, social presence, stickiness, and word-of-mouth to measure the trust of virtual community members. The quantitative analysis suggests that China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are three culturally diverse regions and there exists significant differences in individual trust tendency, social presence, stickiness, and word-of-mouth. When testing the relationship between antecedents of trust and trusting belief the analysis shows that individual trust tendency and social presence relates to trusting belief positively. Furthermore, trusting belief influences trust behavior positively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]