Examining multi-user virtual environments like Second Life

Overview

Ross Perkins, Senior Research Associate is a key contributor in The Office of Educational Research and Outreach (OERO), which is part of Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. He will use NVivo 8 on a project that examines the adoption and integration of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) like Second Life.

Ross is examining the adoption and integration of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) like Second Life.

He is collecting data through face-to-face interviews, web-based surveys, text and voice chat within the virtual world. He’s also using screen shots (BMP images) of project phases, text found on blogs and listservs, and even movies made in the environment (‘machinima’). Approximately 150 high school students, teachers, and technology integration specialists are expected to be involved in the project.

“A number of the new features will be very useful. I plan to use NVivo 8 on my MUVEs project, as well as for ongoing and future literature reviews. The format of information will include a number of documents in PDF format, audio recordings of interviews, and digital images (screen shots) of the work. The feature that initially caught my attention was the ability to import and code PDF documents. Currently, one has to create proxy documents for them and link to them. Having the ability to work with them directly in NVivo 8 will save time and effort.

“Though I do not personally do team-based research, a number of faculty members are on research teams. The added ability to view codes (nodes) by team member and to compare coding is a valuable addition. Sharing research findings via the web, or through exporting to Word documents, is also important.”