Well, in the last 24 hours I have mustered up the courage to delve into a whole new virtual world that is exciting and fresh and offers huge potential for interaction and learning.

To begin with I needed to download the application (about 72mb) and then had to register with a user name and a password. I used my own first name but needed to choose another second name – I became Helen Moonite. Pretty cool sounding name I think!My next step was to choose an avatar that I could later modify.

Upon entering Second Life I was run through a series of tutorials that help you to communicate, travel, and modify appearance. In this area I was supported by other newbies who were just one step ahead of me.

Today I went into Jokaydia, a region created by Jo Kay from Wollongong. Here a number of OZ/NZ educators met the night before. Unfortunately I was late in last night so decided to go and explore tonight. I found a few twitter friends there, including barbs1, Laurenogrady, heymilly, efreeman and jokay. Jokay was amazingly helpful to the newbies and made you feel very comfortable even after the many mishaps that can happen when you are still learning to walk, fly and even get dressed.

This is a screen shot of me as Helen Moonite standing in front of the Edublogs sign.

As I said the possibilities for learning and interacting are many and in the next few weeks I will explore these further. Please feel to add how you use Second Life in your educational setting.