O n f e r e n c e

TECHNICAL ISSUES 
This research has encountered a number of technical obstacles from its beginning. The 
first issue was the fact that Second Life only worked on fairly modern computers, with a 
good graphics card and a fast internet connection. That ruled out the computers from the 
computer lab at the university where the research took place, so the sessions had to be 
carried out from the students’ homes. 
The second challenge was to find a screen recorder for the Second Life sessions which 
could record both the microphone and the surrounding audio as well as the moving images 
for at least on hour, which was the length of the sessions. A number of screen recording 
software programs were tried, but most of them could only record one audio source or 
another. Finally SnapzPro, an IOS-based software, was used to record the sessions from 
the teacher's computer. One of the downsides of carrying out the sessions outside the 
university premises was that the researcher was not able to record the students' screens, 
being limited to the teacher's perspective. Another issue which will be analyzed in the 
study is the students’ technical proficiency with the Second Life program. This aspect had 
a great impact on the delivery of the sessions. 
After the sessions were recorded, the macro transcription was developed and the material 
to be analyzed was selected. Before going into the micro level stage of analysis, the 
researcher considered that a rough transcription of the data was needed to be transcribed 
to help identify the communication strategies that occurred. This “meso” level comes from 
the need of understanding better the multimedia material available before making 
decisions at a micro level. Transana was used to get a 'meso transcription' as it was a 
program that enabled the researcher to transcribe video data including time stamps to link 
the transcription to its video.
One of the latest challenges that is being dealt with is finding a software for coding and 
transcribing the multiplicity of layers in the interactions that allows the researcher to work 
with several transcripts alongside the video.
Several well-known software programs were tried, however, none of them met with all the 
requirements needed for the 3M transcription.
The sessions were one-hour long and although most important software programs have 
included a video component to their software, it is not powerful enough to work with big 
video files. Others did not allow to link the video to more than one transcript or did not 
allow inter-transcript links. Thus, a web program has been developed for the purpose of 
creating multi-faceted transcripts, which in turn will enable the researcher to analyze and 
code video data in a multi-layered way.