HE’s pandemic-driven shift to online platforms has increased social and learning disconnection amongst students. In online group work/teamwork, many are reluctant to switch on their cameras to be more present to others. Compassion in group work/teamwork is defined as noticing, not normalizing, one’s own and/or others’ distress or disadvantaging and taking wise action to prevent or reduce this. This notion of compassion is being assessed in the HE sector using filmed task-focused in-class group work meetings to identify levels of both inclusivity and criticality around the team. This study investigates the use and outcomes of using the compassionate communications strategies (that were developed in and for the offline classroom) in online team meetings. In this mixed-methods study, two groups of four international STEM students, each from a sample of five UK universities, were video-recorded in task-focused group work meetings (TGMs) before and after an online interactive 90-min training session (‘the intervention’) on the Cognitive Skills of Compassionate Communications (CSCC) in teams. A comparison of the (pre and post CSCC intervention) quantitative and qualitative data results indicated, post-intervention, a significant increase in students’ screen gaze attentiveness to each other, and reasons why students’ motivation to switch on their cameras had changed.

In this article, we build on research arguing that linguistic self-representation on social media can be viewed as a form of face-work and that the strategies employed by users are influenced by both a desire to connect with others and a need to preserve privacy. Drawing on our own analyses of usernames as well as that of others which were conducted as part of a large-scale project investigating usernames in 14 languages (Schlobinski/T. Siever 2018a), we argue that these conflicting goals of wanting to be recognised as an authen­tic member of an in-group while retaining a degree of anonymity are also observable in the choice of username. Online self-naming can thus be viewed as a key practice in the debate of face-work on social media platforms, because names and naming strategies can be stud­ied more readily than broader and more complex aspects, such as stylistic variation or text-image interdependence, while at the same time forming part of these.

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IntroductionAssociated with learning and social isolation from each other during the pandemic-driven transition to online platforms in Higher Education (HE), many students were, and remain, reluctant to turn on their video cameras to be present with each other during their online meetings.Using the Compassionate Mind Foundation's definition of compassion, not as an emotion, but as a psychobiological motivation to take wise action to help when self or others struggle, this comparative study examined (a) the deployment by students during online, task-focused group/team meetings, of taught verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that were explicitly compassionate and (b) the effects of these strategies on each other's social and learning experiences in these meetings, compared to when they did not use them.MethodsTwenty-four STEM students from a sample of five Sri Lankan universities, were mixed, then divided into six groups of four students per group. This mixed-methods study, video-recorded and analyzed each group's task-focused group meetings before, then after, an online interactive 90-min training session (the intervention) in the Cognitive Skills of Compassionate Communications (CSCC) for groups/teams.ResultsUsing R, SPSS and Microsoft Excel to analyse the quantitative data, a statistically significant improvement in students' screen-gaze attentiveness was identified after the CSCC intervention. The qualitative data analysis explained this and other behavioral changes that were shown to enhance students' social and learning experiences in their online meetings.Given the strong historical and political drivers of current divisions across Sri Lankan student communities, these findings call for more urgent research on compassion as a cognitive competence for accelerating group/team cohesion and criticality across HE, and beyond.

Building on our own research (Kersten and Lotze 2018; Kersten and Lotze 2020; Lotze and Kersten (in press); Lotze and Kersten (under review)) as well as other work in this area (Bechar-Israeli 1995; Stommel 2007; Lindholm 2013; Aleksiejuk 2016a, 2016b), this article will discuss the pragmatics of (self-)naming practices online and how they contribute to identity construction and face-work (Bedijs, Held and Maaß 2014; Seargeant and Tagg 2014). Drawing on the data collected, both existing and analysed as part of a wider study of usernames across 14 languages (Schlobinski and Siever 2018a), the use and function of anthroponyms and other names in online contexts are explored. Furthermore, we endeavour to situate both onomastic- and sociolinguistic research in the field of digitally-mediated interaction (DMI) and in the field of pragmatics in general.