Francesco Prelorentzos' Blog

Building upon our last two topics, I wanted to do something creative in a virtual world and incorporate one of my old projects. Over 6 years ago when I was a Sophomore in high school I created a 3D CAD Model of Thomas The Tank Engine for my Intro to Engineering class. I created the model in Tinkercad and it can be viewed here: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/eyyGT58A08B-thomas-the-tank-engine Now I wanted to take a step further and downloaded the model as a schematic file, so I could import it into a virtual world in Minecraft, to do this I utilized the MCEdit tool. Here you can see Thomas as a virtual world in Minecraft: Excuse the phone picture as my screenshot tool is broken.

There are many ways that new media tools can be used in creative ways. One very popular method is creating satirical parodies, which are protected under fair use of copyrighted material. However as seen in the reading, "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?", it states that Disney views parodies as stealing their content but only enforces on a case by case basis. It can because parodies such as the example given in the reading of the Crank That music, aren't detrimental to the cartoon's image and even boost its popularity as a form of free advertising for Disney. This user-generated creativity is an opportunity to capitalize off of. As seen in the recent reading, How user-generated content can improve your social media marketing strategy , having the actual end-users of a product or service share their beliefs and thoughts through creative videos is a very effective form of advertising and results in sales. A popular form is video testimonials, and ...

Virtual worlds are a powerful tool as they can be used to imitate reality in a safe way, for corporate purposes such as training employees or carrying out conferences. But also, they can be an outlet for creativity and this is seen mostly in video games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. A recently popular form of virtual worlds is virtual reality. A potential pro and con of virtual worlds are that it can affect the user's mental health. As seen in the reading,  Virtual world may impact real-world behaviour, in this article, there is a positive example where a user sees their skinny avatar and it motivates them to lose weight in real life. However, there are a lot of cases where people become addicted to their alternate reality and the "second life" they live where they start to neglect real-life responsibilities in favor of their life in the virtual world. Virtual worlds foster creativity as many people treat them as an escape from reality where they can create ...

A Twitter discussion can be similar to a Blackboard discussion. They are both conveyed through text on a screen. However, when discussing on Twitter, you are limited to 280 characters, so you either have to get your point across very quickly or use multiple tweets. Also, by having your discussion on Twitter, it can be seen by the public and not just classmates. This can lead to having some discussions interrupted by strangers who are also interested in the topic or just want to disturb you. A benefit for both methods is that the conversation doesn't have to occur in real-time, students can reply to each other at any point in time. In comparison, an in-class discussion is different as people don't communicate the same way face to face as they do online. Some students are too shy to speak up in class but have no problem contributing their ideas over text, whether its Twitter or Discussion Board. Also, when you're in-class, your audience is limited to whoever is in the classr...

The four social networking sites I'm most familiar with are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and recently TikTok. All of which have their own strengths that I use them for. In the case of Facebook, I primarily use Facebook as a means of communication. The majority of my extended family is in Greece, and they all like to use Facebook to post updates and chat on Messenger. Messenger, in my opinion, is Facebook's best feature and the reason why I still use it today. Some of my friends don't have iPhones, so instead of iMessage, Messenger is a good substitute. Another great feature of Facebook is the marketplace feature in groups. I'm in a few buying and selling groups and have found buyers for sneakers on there before. I mainly use Instagram to keep up to date with what's going on in my friends' lives. Instagram stories is a very popular feature where people can post pictures or videos of what's going on in their day to day lives, and they only last for 24 hours b...

These  social networking technologies can be used not only for widespread communication among friends, peers, and strangers, but it's also a capitalistic opportunity for both individuals and the corporations that run these networks.  In the reading, NBC2 Investigators: Multi-million dollar scam being used on Facebook, the article details the facebook marketplace feature. This is actually a very useful way of finding people who may be interested in goods you have to sell. I have actually used this feature myself when selling shoes or streetwear. Unfortunately, as this article discusses this feature also gave rise to a lot of scammers. You have to vigilant when dealing in commerce on Facebook as there are a lot of people who are trying to take advantage of you For individuals, we have seen in recent years the rise of the “influencer”. People who are able to create large audiences on social media, that’s essentially almost a cult following, are able to profit off of social me...