Recent years have drawn a great attention to generation MZ and Metaverse, due to 4th industrial revolution and the development of digital environment that blurs the boundary between reality and virtual reality.
Generation MZ approaches the information very differently from the existing generations and uses distinguished communication methods. In terms of learning, they have different motivations, types, skills and build relationships differently. Meanwhile, Metaverse is drawing a great attention as a teaching method that fits traits of gen MZ. Thus, the current research aimed to investigate how to increase the use of Metaverse in Educational Technology. Specifically, this research examined the antecedents of popularity of Gather Town, a platform of Metaverse. Big data of news articles have been collected and analyzed using the Bigkinds system provided by Korea Press Foundation. The analysis revealed, first, a rapid increasing trend of media exposure of Gather Town since July 2021. This suggests a greater utilization of Gather Town in the field of education after the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, Word Association Analysis and Word Cloud Analysis showed high weights on education related words such as ‘remote’, ‘university’, and ‘freshman’, while words like ‘Metaverse’, ‘Metaverse platform’, ‘Covid19’, and ‘Avatar’ were also emphasized. Third, Network Analysis extracted ‘COVID19’, ‘Avatar’, ‘University student’, ‘career’, ‘YouTube’ as keywords. The findings also suggest potential value of Gather Town as an educational tool under COVID19 pandemic. Therefore, this research will contribute to the application and utilization of Gather Town in the field of education.