It has been estimated that 85.5% ([14]) of school aged children own a mobile phone in the UK from which 29%([10]) of them access the Internet. It is assumed that this ownership provides the children with the opportunity to establish and maintain social connections with their fellow peers. According to Vygotsky's Social Development Theory([21]) this social interaction with peers plays a role in children's cognitive development that has been exploited in modern educational systems in various ways. This ongoing research aims to make further use of this association between ownership of mobile devices, social nteraction and learning by ultimately introducing a technological solution for children to communicate with their peers and access peer generated content. It will investigate whether the mobility and the information source, peer versus non-peer, enhances children's learning. Two separate investigations have been conducted, so far, to determine the sources and the tools children use to obtain support for their learning. A survey of 74 Key Stage 3 children and two focus group sessions with 34 similar age children found that they actively use technologies, such as Face book, SMS and email, to establish peer interaction.

We present a QoS architecture for collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), focusing on the management of streamed video within shared virtual worlds. Users express QoS requirements by negotiating levels of mutual awareness using our previously defined spatial model of interaction. The architecture uses these awareness values as part of dynamic QoS management. A key aspect of the architecture is that it maintains a balance between the needs of a group of users as a whole (e.g., which streams are admitted onto a shared network) versus those of individual users within the group (e.g., which streams are subscribed to by a local host). We walk through a demonstration scenario, a virtual shopping mall, to show the architecture at work.

We extend previous work on texture mapping video streams into virtual environments by introducing awareness driven video QoS.This uses movements within a shared virtual world to activate different video services.In turn, these services have different settings for underlying QoS parameters such as frame-rate, resolution and compression.We demonstrate this technique through a combined conferencing!mediaspace application which uses awareness driven video for facial expressions and for views into remote physical environments.We reflect on the issues of spatial consistency, privacy, seamless shifts in mutual involvement and making underlying QoS mechanisms more visible, malleable and flexible.

We propose an approach to creating shared mixed realities based on the construction of transparent boundaries between real and virtual spaces. First, we introduce a taxonomy that classifies current approaches to shared spaces according to the three dimensions of transportation, artificiality, and spatiality. Second, we discuss our experience of staging a poetry performance simultaneously within real and virtual theaters. This demonstrates the complexities involved in establishing social interaction between real and virtual spaces and motivates the development of a systematic approach to mixing realities. Third, we introduce and demonstrate the technique of mixed-reality boundaries as a way of joining real and virtual spaces together in order to address some of these problems.

We review current spatial approaches to CSCW (mediaspaces, spatial video conferencing, collaborative virtual environments and telepresence)and classify them along the proposed dimensions of transportation, artificiality and spatiality.This classification leads us to identify new shared space application so called mixed realities.We present an example of a mixed reality called the Internet Foyer, an application which provides a unified entry point into an organisation's physical and electronic environments and which supports awareness and chance encounters between the occupants of physical and synthetic space.