do I have time for a second life?

After going to the presentation yesterday, I felt very enthusiastic about the potential of Second Life as a tool for teaching and learning. So finally, against all the odds, I have got myself an avatar and have spent my first evening exploring. First I went to a 'mall' where newbies like myself were meant to be able to find more out - but quite how one went about this was not clear. I read a bit about changing my appearance and tweaked it a bit - taller, slimmer - as I would like in my first life. Hot places to visit were not particularly interesting and not many people were around. All a bit lonely and boring really. So I decided to visit ucreative island - also empty. There was an 'interactive whiteboard' so I tried to interact with it and ended up losing control of my avatar to a little blue blob for no apparent reason other than to move it up, down, left and right!! What was that all about? Very disappointing, but I was probably missing something - what? There was also no instructions about how to get my movements back to normal which impeded my explorations for the rest of the evening and resulted in me flying sideways through a rainforest!! Great graphics but they crashed my computer.

The Uni is thinking about starting a new degree in computer gaming and it is possible that I would be asked to teach on this course - so I feel I should persevere with this in an attempt to carve out a relevant area of expertise. Reckon I'll have to ask my son to help me with the basics as I can't see how I will have time to complete the learning curve in tutorials. I don't particularly want to start building and so on, but I am very interested in Second Life's potential to pilot new methods of teaching, communicating with students and colleagues at other campuses, showing student work, disseminating research and so on. Coincidentally the Guardian Education ran a short piece about this today.