Professor Vic Lally2 & Dr Madeleine Sclater1

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

Inter-Life is an ESRC/EPSRC TEL

Project no ESRC RES-139-25-0402

Investigating Immersive Learning Communities with 'Inter-Life’ (pt2)

ResearcherComplexity/role tension

“…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.

There are a whole lot of factors that have to be carefully managed. I think it is developing an understanding between team members. (4)”

ResearcherComplexity/role tension

interdisciplinarity

“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) (5)”

ResearchInterdisciplinarity

“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)

5 September 2009 BERA Manchester UK 5

Inter-Life IslandSky Temple

EducatorAgency

“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)”

5 September 2009 6BERA Manchester UK

EducatorAgency

“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 …compared to other environments like 2 D VLEs” (2)

EducatorEthics

“I think … there are huge moral and ethical issues in project like ours…. the use of an avatar based environment throws up some issues that are pretty similar to any other form of social networking but there are some particular issues associated with identity …that are interesting in an avatar based environment … that throw up interesting issues from an educational perspective…” (3)

5 September 2009 BERA Manchester UK 9

Inter-Life IslandSky Temple

Team MemberInterdisciplinarity

“This is my first introduction to an interdisciplinary team and the processes of working in such a team… I didn’t appreciate… how difficult it would be to work with people from so many different backgrounds … the challenge of getting on to the same page with everyone in the team…people working in different paradigms… For me… the challenge has been to communicate what it is we are trying to do and achieve in an educational sense and try and communicate that as effectively and as clearly as possible … in some ways this helps you to refine your own thinking…because you are having to say it in so many different ways and possibly rethink what you were saying…(2)”

5 September 2009 10BERA Manchester UK

Team Memberco-design

“I do get a little concerned sometimes looking at the island and thinking ‘oh what is it all going to look like’ but that is something we need to learn which is that we are not there to do it all..(4)”

“As an educationalist I don’t think we can lose sight of the user perspective, the people that we are dealing with.” (3)

5 September 2009 BERA Manchester UK 12

Acknowledgements

University of GlasgowProf Vic LallyDr Brian CanavanDr. Alison DevlinDr. Jane MagillJon TrinderSteve Brindley

University of StirlingProf Evan MagillDr. Karla ParusselDr. Mario Kolberg

University of SheffieldDr. Mike Pomerantz

Edge Hill UniversityDr Maddy Sclater

5 September 2009 BERA Manchester UK 13

Web Links

• Inter-Life Blog: http://www.inter-life.org/blog/

• TEL Web site: http://www.tlrp.org/tel/

5 September 2009 BERA Manchester UK 14

Where next..

• Main Phase Starts September 2009

5 September 2009 BERA Manchester UK 15

Contact Details

Professor Vic Lally (Project PI)

v.lally@educ.gla.ac.uk

Dr. Madeleine Sclater

madeleine.sclater@edgehill.ac.uk