Vic Lally1 Maddy Sclater2

1University of Glasgow (UK) 2Edge Hill University (UK)

Inter-Life is an ESRC/EPSRC TEL Project no ESRC RES-139-25-0402

Inter-LifeWhere Second Life Meets Real Life

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Introduction• ‘Inter-Life: interoperability and transition’ is an

ESRC/EPSRC funded Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Project 2008-2011

• University of Glasgow, with Universities of Stirling, Edge Hill and Sheffield (UK)

• Project Blog: http://www.inter-life.org/blog/• TEL Web site: http://www.tlrp.org/tel/• An Interdisciplinary Project involving Education,

Computer Science, Educational Psychology, Art and Design Education

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Inter-Life Aims & Rationale 1• Virtual Worlds (Second Life, Open Sim) plus

mobile devices • Mobile and three-dimensional (3D) virtual

community called ‘Inter-Life’• Skills development by young people to

enhance life transitions (Educational and social transitions)

• Provides reflective and personal development ‘tools and scenarios’ for transitions

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Inter-Life Aims & Rationale 2

• User engagement, co-design, and development

• Identification of learning outcomes, processes, and skills acquisition

• Participant identity formation and development associated with Inter-Life usage

• Professional development of educators working in 3D communities

• Infrastructure development

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User Engagement, Co-design Development

• Creating Inter-Life: an integrated educational environment of web-based and mobile technologies, that will support a virtual working space for young people

• Making it capable of co-design and re-design by users and developers through a set ofgeneric scripting tools

• Developing a set of educational, problem-based activities, within context-based 'scenarios',

• Connecting participants with their PC & mobile phone, asynchronous and real-timeconnections

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Learning outcomes processes, skills acquisition

• Level of experiential and cultural 'assets' of individual and groups enhanced to manage transitions?

• How participants act and develop socially in Inter-Life, while engaged in 'scenarios'

• Skills and understandings 'map' onto 'real world' experiences of transition?

• How scenarios can be used, together with a suite of 'Transition Tools', to support young people through their key life transitions

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Participant Perspectives of the Inter-Life Experience

• Participants experience of Inter-Life as a place to address their real-world transition challenges

• Opportunities to 'personalise' their involvement help engagement?

• Staying flexibly engaged with Inter-Life through mobile technologies enhances experiences?

• Contribution to Identity Formation and Self Image?• Risk, conflict and goal-setting are handled and how this maps

onto real world• Consistency of individual and group personas across the real

and virtual worlds

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Professional Development

• How the Inter-Life environment can support structured professional development (mentor; facilitator)

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The Inter-Life Infrastructure• How a SIP-based distributed application can integrate

real physical devices (both mobile and fixed) with their virtual counterparts, used by the avatars in Inter-Life.

• How novel virtual devices within Inter-Life can be integrated, using physical devices with limited capabilities.

• How a two-tier P2P overlay architecture can combine low latency and scalable routing-table traffic.

• How can this prove robust where there is significant churn and the infrastructure must support SIP basedcommunications and a high volume of document storage.

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Some Key Research Questions 1

• How:– Transitional change such as risk, conflict and goal-

setting can be handled in the virtual world– Personas develop through transitions in the real

and virtual worlds, and how the personalisation of avatars assists this

– Interoperability can be successfully achieved between applications, documents and media

– Flexible use of mobile technologies can be employed to enhance the skill development for transitional experiences

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Some Key Research Questions 2

How:• An application framework can be developed for

interchangeable use of real devices and virtual devices

• A novel Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay architecture can be developed that provides both fast data transfer and robustness

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Mixed Research Methods • Mixed-method, technology-enhanced data

gathering and analysis. 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 individual and social construct, rather than a fixed quality or ‘given’.

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Time scale (pilot)

• Pilot in Derbyshire and Glasgow April - June 2009– Scenario 1: Gifted / Looked After Young

People develop ‘transitions out of vulnerability’

– Scenario 2: Undergraduates develop transitions through higher education / employment

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InterLife IslandCommunication Garden

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Inter-Life IslandSkybox Diary Room

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Inter-Life IslandOrientation Tower

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More on InterdisciplinarityViewpoints

• Researcher

• Educator

• Team members

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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)

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Research…Being a team member means being involved in the

research and so in that sense they can’t really be separated but 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 plan that was developed at the start in the proposal phase.(2)

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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 .. 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)

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Team MemberIts my first introduction into an interdisciplinary

team and the processes of working in such a team, and I have found this an interesting process, from the perspective of appreciating how difficult it would be to work with people from so many different backgrounds and the …challenge of getting on to the same page with everyone in the team - people working in different paradigms(2)

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Research Tools

• A virtual space or ‘diary room’ that will provide a ‘built in’ mechanism for personal and facilitated reflection, for skills development, for data gathering and for Inter-Life evaluation.

• An e-Portfolio to record and document participant development against transition outcomes.

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Communications and Community

• Building a Participant Community:– In-world / Out-of-World – Blogging / micro-blogging (Twitter)– Chat/IM/Sparkle– SMS– Web– Voice

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Summary

• Informal and Formal Transitions

• Virtual World Community with Mobile Enhancement

• Co-designed

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Where next..

• Main Phase Starts September 2009