I was extremely lucky today to attend a superb course on presenting research at conferences led by [1] Dr Margaret Collins

Also just by chance of them being there - I began to realise that to explain virtual worlds, you needed to explain avatars - and these were on my desk:

Do you remember when you were a child - you used to play with figures - maybe dolls or action figures - Barbie, Ken, it could have been plasticine - and then you maybe took the play aspect further - creating scenarios - it could be police, fire, hospital - role playing different scenarios
. If like me, you did stuff like this - you used to get them to talk to each other - role playing conversations and probably learning experiences too.

Well - forget the technology - for this it doesn’t matter - an avatar in a virtual world is a little ‘figure’ that you manipulate in a very similar way to you did as a child, it doesn’t matter that you are an adult and using a keyboard instead of picking up the figure and moving it around. This doesn’t mean you have to do what you did as a child, but the experience in a virtual world allows you and your avatar to explore - to demonstrate - to ask questions from others and communicate.

Photos taken very quickly with phone and thanks to Margaret for permission to use her training ‘materials’ :-)))