Abstract
This study examines and analyzes the public perspectives, attitudes, sentiments, and discourses regarding the metaverse and its general and educational use. The study explores four research questions and involves the analysis of two datasets containing over 8 million tweets from Twitter (currently called X). The analysis involves text mining, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling techniques and to carry it out different tools are used, such as the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Word-Emotion Association Lexicon (EmoLex), Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning (VADER), TextBlob, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), etc. Based on the results, the increase in interest of the public in the metaverse is in line with that of the educational and scientific communities. The public expressed mostly positive attitudes and emotions toward the general and educational use of the metaverse while the negative sentiment percentage was really low. The sentiments and emotions were more intense within the tweets of the educational dataset. The versatility and applicability of the metaverse emerged from the topic analysis from which eight topics arose: digital currencies, virtual environments, gaming, education, immersive learning environments, entertainment, online communities, and industry. The increasing interest in the metaverse, its potentials to enrich education, and the positive attitudes of the public toward its use in education were evident. More intense emotions and sentiments were expressed in the educational dataset which indicates that impulsive decisions may occur and should be anticipated in the educational domain and that the educational community is open to new approaches and supports technology-enhanced learning. Social media arose as an effective medium to communicate the integration of new technologies and innovations in education.
Published Version
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