Refining

Now that I was 2/3rds through my readings to clear up my understanding of the term Presence I decided to go through the folders and pick out the articles that I felt were significant.

I chose articles that looked at Gaming (Video games, MMORPG’s)  from a perspective of at least one factor of Presence (Immersion, Social Interactions, Well-Being, Motivation etc) If one of these factors were looked at with regards Social Networking sites I included those as well as I feel that the Social Factor is of extreme relevance to Internet use and Presence and can be found in successful games.

A lot of articles were concerned with problematic usage of, or addiction as these were the articles I first was the most interested in.  I think that this is not a drawback, problematic Usage could highlight factors that should be taken into consideration when designing and using these technologies in an Educational Setting.

One author in particular caught my attention, Johannes Frommes. He has brought up 2 important issues that I will need to look at.

1)   Most of the research has been done on Adults and Adolescents. He suggests that children are different and we cannot presume that findings we have are generalisable across this age divide.

2)   He also suggests that Children are from a different media generation and that research questions that have so far been studied have been from the perspective of an old worldview related to Media.

I have about 38 articles that I think could comprise a relatively good base.

Regretfully I do not have any from the MIT Press Presence: Teleoperators and Visual Presence as the library does not give access to this journal. I could get them through another contact but would have liked to search through this database with some keywords relating to my specific interest.

I think my research angle is starting to become a little bit clearer to me:

It deals with Causes and Effects of Presence in Gaming, with particular attention to children.

I am now going to do another search on articles that may be more honed in to this angle.

Better late than never.