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Given I haven't had the luck to really to play Earthdawn, I may have to run it to get a chance to play, but given I have limited experience with the game, are there any suggestions you would give a starting GM?

For reference, I have the 4th Edition PDF and so forth, and I just happened to stumble into a large amount of 3rd Ed books thanks to a garage sale.

for your first time out, try having some encounters with Jethra or cadavermen so you can get used to the combat system.

Actually be careful with the Jehuthra fight it can go south really quick if you are using its powers correctly, depending on the party composition. Between the two attacks per round, decent armor, the iron web and frost web powers, a spellcasting step of 14, and an attack step of 13 a TPK is likely to happen. There is a reason that 3rd edition rated them as a 4th circle (1 per 2 PC) challenge.

Some things that spring to mind:

1) If your players have not played a 'crunchy' system before be patient.

2) The step system seems complex and nonsensical. It isn't, the step number represents the average roll you'd expect. So if they are rolling a step 9 and the difficulty is 5 it is likely they will succeed, 9 it is roughly 50/50, 13 it is more likely they will fail. This is helpful in deciding when to spend karma.

3) Expect character creation to take a while. I found it helpful to have player's pick their discipline before we got together for character creation so that I could read up on all of the talents and talent options. I also let my player's pick first circle talent options after the first adventure/session.
a) People that shy away from complexity might find casters overwhelming.

4) I completely skipped blood magic and thread magic (aside from spell casting) for a while. The rules are not terribly complex but they add enough on top to be overwhelming.

5) It is worth playing up the fact that the game system and the world are actually well connected. Circles, disciplines, threads, talents are all things any adept in the game world would be familiar with.

6) 4th ed rules are well streamlined so I would use them.

7) If you are new to being a GM be wary of players picking Windlings (and to a lesser extent Obsidiman). Windlings are especially good at screwing up the best laid plans of a GM. If you are experienced you can likely roll with it.

8) Not every discipline is a combat powerhouse so cater to what is chosen. In my group a player chose a scout. I don't usually emphasis the navigation/wilderness survival stuff but in this case I have emphasized it. Their character helps a bit in combat but a lot out of combat and it works well. I try to make the non-combat talents useful. Speak Language used to be a discipline talent so I made situations where it might be useful.

9) Give the character's downtime. Quite a few things take time to accomplish in Earthdawn. Give the character's time to do those things. These things can possibly lead to other adventures. Do they want to find a master to train them in a second discipline, track down information about a thread item, learn a particular spell, work on crafting some item, etc.

Cool, that seems like a solid idea. Is there any particular campaign setup that is good as an introduction?

I've read that the Kaer campaign is a decent start...and I was planning on mercilessly using setting elements from Majora's Mask.

If you can get your hands on the Ardanyan's Revenge adventure that gives you the option of starting outside the kaer, and getting in or inside the kaer, getting out. Inside the kaer works particularly well if the players are new to the setting and you haven't told them the Scourge is over.

I recommend talking to each of your players in advance to get a feel for what characters the want to play. Once you have an idea about the disciplines involved play-test encounters with mock characters. You will become more familiar with the rules yourself which is very important and you can ensure the heroes and withstand the events.

Another trick for balancing an encounter is to put a penalty on the creatures. The world is not static. The higher level encounter can be defeated by first circle heroes if it is already wounded. Example, the heroes encounter a giant spider who two days ago barely won a fight. It has not recovered fully so has 2 wounds (-2 steps on everything). Another example is the bandits have been celebrating their raid and are drunk (harried).

Converting monsters isn't too hard. The big thing to watch out for is armor (because it works a little bit differently).

As a general rule, here's the way creature armor was tweaked for conversion to ED4:

Armor Value up to 5: Keep as is.
Armor Value beyond 5: Half value (round down)

So a creature with Physical Armor 4 still has PA 4.

A creature with PA 9 would end up with 7 (First 5 are the same, four points beyond that halves to 2, 5+2 = 7).

It may be when I start looking at even higher armor creatures (dragons, horrors) there might be more adjustments, but for a starting game that's a good place to start.