Introduction to Second life

        Second life is a virtual World that allows you to have your 3D Avatar, speech, and a virtual life in the Web. It's possible to Visit different places, meet different peoples from different countries, go shopping, get settled, be creative, make money, and also take part in classes.

        Second Life is generally for adults 18 years and older; however, if you are 13 years of age or older you can use Second Life with some restrictions. If you're:

• 16-17 years old you can access regions and search results that have a General maturity rating.
• 13-15 years old, you can access Second Life through an affiliated organization and will be restricted to the private estate of that organization. Only avatars approved by that organization will be able to enter these estates. You can't use Second Life search or purchase items from the Marketplace.

         Several aspects of second life that could be interesting to everybody is the ability to create your own avatar, change the clothing and even create clothing, saving them and being able to sell them or share them with others.We can teleport to different places around the world, we can have our friend's list and invite them to teleport to where we are now by just right click on their name, and send them a message.

         First time I used the second life, It was in our EIT Emergance of Instructional Technology Class in University of Northern Iowa, Dr.Zeitz, made a virtual house that all my classmates and I could have a meeting, exploring around the house, teleport to different landmarks, and also talk to each other. we were also able to text message each other.

        The best thing about that was that we had our own virtual meeting sessions, and we could discuss our course content there, with no limitation, however the Avatar of classmates with their names shown above them could help this meeting be more real and fun.

        Second life lets the instructor create his/her ideal context, which is difficult to be made in other Web2.0 tools, Therefore it can be used in a variety of useful ways especially for educational purpose. On the other hand it will be a controlled situation with it's own limitation or features.

        We just need to read the terms and watch some tutorials that could help us learn more about it, it might be time taking at the beginning to learn how to do different things there, but after you get in, everything will be attractive enough to make you like to continue.