Dr Madeleine Sclater 1 & Professor Vic Lally 2 1 Edge Hill University (UK) 2 University of Glasgow (UK) Inter-Life is an ESRC/EPSRC TEL Project no ESRC RES Bringing Theory to Life: towards three- dimensional learning communities with 'Inter-Life'

Overview Project Background Emerging Interdisciplinarity: issues of grounding for the team 26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G122

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G123 Introduction ‘Inter-Life: interoperability and transition’ is an ESRC/EPSRC funded Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Project University of Glasgow, with Universities of Stirling, Edge Hill and Sheffield (UK) An Interdisciplinary Project involving Education, Computer Science, Educational Psychology, Art and Design Education

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G124 Inter-Life Aims & Rationale Inter-Life Island is a 3D multi-user environment (based on Second Life ® ), with mobile device integration. The project is about enabling young people to acquire and develop skills to enhance life transitions (educational and social transitions/formal and informal).

Two Scenarios Scenario 1: co-designed by Young People (YP). Focusing on informal transition activities with ‘Gifted and Talented’, and Looked After and Accommodated (LAAC) YP and their friends, teachers, parents and others. Formation of a Research Community. Production of artifacts (artwork, videos, poetry and other writing) Scenario 2: the school to university transition. Inter-Life will provide a structured, safe, and realistic introduction to this new world.Set of student-generated activities leading to a flexible, sustainable, online resource to help the School to University transition. 26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G125

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G126 Communications and Community Building a Participant Community: –In-world / Out-of-World –Blogging / micro-blogging (Twitter/Twitpic) Chat/IM/Sparkle –SMS –Web –Voice

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G127 Inter-Life Island Communication Garden

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G128 Inter-Life Island ‘Orientation Tower’

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G129 Research Questions How can transitional change including goal-setting, ‘identity change’, risk, conflict and can be handled in the virtual world? How do personal identities develop during transitions in the virtual world, and how does this map onto real world activity? How can integrated use of mobile technologies be employed to enhance skill development in transitional experiences? How can ‘interoperability’ be successfully achieved between applications, documents and media?

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G1210 Methodology Mixed-method, technology-enhanced data gathering (diary room, blogs, audio) and analysis. (NVivo, Ucinet) Phenomenographic techniques are being used - analysing personal accounts of participants across a range of settings. The project is investigating identity development from an Activity Theory perspective, viewing identity as an individual and social construct, rather than a fixed quality or ‘given’.

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G1211 InterLife Island Diary Room

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G1212 Emerging Interdisciplinarity ?Issues of Grounding Viewpoints Researcher Educator Team member

Research*… “As a researcher, I set out with a pretty clear set of notions about what the methods and methodologies would be.. BUT how do we resolve the very BIG methodological differences between social science and computing science (and can we and should we) because they are addressing different things. Social Science is dealing with humans in all their complexity and I think its deeply problematic to see humans as systems, whereas you can see computers as systems…(1)”

Researcher* “I think to a certain extent I am surprised at the different perspectives that people have. I thought that there might be more uniform understanding. I am just a little bit surprised by the amount of ideas that have surfaced. I find it a little difficult to stay focused on what my priorities are because there is so much information coming through about what can be done. I think it is evolving and I think people are starting to learn that to move forward we do need to keep going because that is the nature of working with a mixed group of strong researchers in terms of the computing science expertise and the education and social science. There are a whole lot of factors that have to be carefully managed. I think it is developing an understanding between team members. (4)”

Researcher* “My initial response would be to say that the educator role, the researcher role and the team member role can be rolled into one ‘gestalt’ (The principle of Gestalt psychology is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts). I think there is something awesome and something profound about what we are doing. I find myself discussing this project with all kinds of people. I know everything in my heart and head is telling me this is what kids are needing because particularly gifted and talented kids are bored out of their minds in school. This to me could work.(5)”

Research “Being a team member also means being involved in the research and so in that sense they can’t really be separated ….I am always looking at the research opportunities, ways to progress, ways and means of implementing, developing and extracting research findings from the project. (2)” “We are learning ourselves as we are doing the research, and we’ll fine tune the data-gathering and the analysis as we go along as well as being mindful of the detailed research plan that was developed at the start in the proposal phase.(2)”

Research… “From the research perspective…what attracted me was the notion of true interdisciplinarity, the opportunity to work with other people in domains that you have some knowledge of but you’re largely unfamiliar with the approaches taken..”(3)

26 August 2009EARLI Amsterdam Session G1218 Inter-Life Island Sky Temple

Educator* “I think a lot of educational spaces that exist are deeply constrained by social, cultural and political forces that mostly don’t want them to be exploratory spaces and have very restricted views of knowledge and creation and don’t want to accommodate a mixing of the social emotional and cognitive whereas I think a lot of our learning is a mixture of all three of those...and so as an educator I was attracted to Second Life as a space where that possibility exists…(1)”

Educator* “Being an educator, goes hand in hand with being a researcher..I can see a tremendous opportunity to support people to develop their creativity in more diverse ways than perhaps they have been able to [explore] in other environments…my hunch is that this environment …may make people think in ways they have not been able to [think] just by nature of its virtual-ness, its 3Dness… to play… to explore, the unregulated-ness of it in some ways compared to other environments like 2 D VLEs” (2)