Group Projects

The day was finally here and it was time to present our projects . My team members and I logged on a bit earlier just so we could go through things and see if all our microphones were working correctly and that our timing was suitable for each of us. We used methods from our building class where we created a board to lay each of our imagery.

Finan was in charge of switching all of our imagery during our presentation. Overall i was very pleased with our project and how it went for all of us. I was also very impressed at what other classmates did because there was a great variation and everyone showed their own taste.

We were lucky to have 2 guest lecturers return and critic our presentation which i found very helpful. The project i seemed to enjoy the most was the Youtube video that we watched for 7 minutes. I found their attention to detail extremely good and relevant.

And thats it for my last post merry crimbo!

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Hashtags

For today the topic was hashtags, hashtags are becoming evermore popular in todays world, firstly trending on twitter then passing on to almost ever social media app/website out there. Personally i don’t use them as i find it far too much effort. However they can be effective for example in charity events such as the ice bucket challenge.

In social media such as Instagram the hashtag can be very important, it links people of the same interest together by categorising. Hashtags such as “fitfam” “irishfitfam” are very popular hashtags here in Ireland. These are Health and Fitness based hashtags. The health and fitness world is becoming hugely popular in the passed few years , mainly on instagram and here is where people go to post their progress,seek motivation, seek support and fans. Theres many more hashtags out there even for this category the list goes on.

After class we had organised to go over our project work, keeping track of everyones progress and monitoring how much work everyone has done and is there enough.

Building

In todays class we begin learning how to create platforms for our imagery for the project ahead. We started with making a flat square board by one another and then choosing any imagery from our photo album to add on to it. If we were to add any imagery of our own we would have to pay 10 linden dollars which John provided with us during the semester.

After learning how to create and add imagery to boards we were free to experiment with our own objects. I created a sort of roof/stage/ledge which i was quite proud of! but unfortunately i didn’t grab a photo.

Poilination went on to create a burrito and a portal which i was quite fond of.

Before heading back to class polination and i lay on one of the classmates objects , enjoying our view.

Content creation-Group Project

So far so good with team work, now it was time to decide aspect of theme we were going to tackle. So we decided to divide it in 3 parts,

corporate, catfish and peers

Each one of us is assigned a topic i was tackling the catfish topic, Finan being peers, graham being corporate.

Now that we had our parts of the presentations assigned we now had to seek research about each whether it be online or from re-reading source material john gave us to freshen our memory and possibly having relevant and useful pointers.

Communities and identity

Planning our group project

approach: Our team has approached the mini deadlines we’ve set ourselves to have certain work done by a certain time pretty well. There is no negative conflict between us just constructive, we expressed each other ideas and began a narrative. We divided work evenly which was a fair option as we were all subject to the same amount of work due to being in the same course

 

Contribution to theme of group project.

The theme for our group project is WHOS WATCHING YOU. For my part of the group project i was to google my teammates real names and see what the results were from this i took notes and brainstormed individually about each of them to see what kind of person i was creating , a bit like frankenstein. You would be surprised at what you can find online but of course its not all accurate and there is people out there with the same names believe it or not ! My teammates also followed up on doing the same idea until we brought all descriptions together to figure out true and false.

Virtual Ability island

Today was the day we were visiting locations/communities in Second Life which were aimed specifically to people with any form of disabilities. Gentle Heron was kind enough to be our tour guide for the duration of our visits. With a population of over 1000 members in the community. Not all members of the community are disabled by the vast majority are but its impossible to tell unless asking! That is the thing about these virtual worlds it makes everyone equal.

These places are designed carefully things such as colour landscape and materials are represented in a tranquil manner. In these areas you will not find stairs but ramps which i found very interesting as that was something i would have not thought of if i was the one creating virtual venue which shows the developers really know what they are doing.

Previous to Virtual Ability Island it was time to teleport to Cape Able to a artist gallery. An artist whom both exhibits in real life and virtually. An artist by the name Slatan Dryke (Real name this time). I found it a great way for artists to broadcast their work the fact that Slatan was recreating the exhibiton virtually for anyone in the world to access.

Art exhibitions are just the only form of exhibition online but poetry, fictions and non fictions and also drama can be found in Cape Serenity. Which resembles a sort of wonderand full of a peaceful atmosphere with birdsong and other various critters wandering around a bit like a recreation of narnia.

Importantance of regulation, convention and etiquette

Regulations as of huge important in a virtual world as anywhere else rules must be made in order to have ideas run successfully , it keeps things in control and not to get out of hand,its a neat and tidy approach to any responsibility.

Convention and etiquette are of course  compulsary as you can meet any kind of person in these online communities. In relation to the Virtual environments which are targetted for people with disabilities convention must be shown towards these communities so things are fair and no one is left feeling uncomfortable as the purpose of these environments is to bring everyone together not apart.

 

Personal Branding – Presence online

First thing first John wanted to make sure with us that we were all comfortable in our groups and there wasn’t any difficulty in contacting others, My group was fine and we had no difficulty communicating (lucky us) but the issue still continued with other class members but that didn’t effect us so ah well hehe.

As a class group we needed a form of communication that everyone or the majority could access and which would notify us on any issues or ask questions if concerned. Facebook again was the suitable candidate. Seeing as it can be used on all forms of devices.

Towards the end of class we went on a little school tour to Lauk’s Nest one of the oldest natural parks in Second Life. Bit like the virtual version of Phoenix Park minus the phoenix’s. This virtual park was passed around from many owners all preserving it keeping as its original portrayal.

Coming to the finale of the school tour John’s promise of the 300 linden dollars came true and we all received before coming class.

Humans of New York

We were asked to view this hugely popular project if you will. This page was not new to me as ive followed many posts on this page. There has even been Irish versions and a lot of piss take versions such as Humans of the Sesh which is a personal favourite of mine.

Brandon Stanton the mastermind behind the Humans of New York franchise. He has not put himself too far in the spotlight showing he is humble about his work and his talent ,instead he lets the models of his photos to be the star and choses not to take away the spotlight because everyone is a star in his eyes.

Next week we will be visiting The Heron Sanctuary. An online community that is targeted for people with disabilities. Things like this shows the new modern world advantages of technology and how it performs as a helping hand.

Teaming up

After being assigned our groups there was slight complications as the third member  was no longer active in the module therefore the groups were changed around and lethalbacon was added to me and dragonslayer’s group due to being in a group where everyone seemed to be inactive , he was pretty lonely so we took him under our wing poor fella.

As a group we had to decide what form of communications we would use whether it would be over the phone or web. We decided  on a facebook group chat which proves more convenient as its something we all use nowadays.

We felt we would rather converse by typing rather than headsets as we ran into difficulties.

On the third day of second life..

today i went to explore second life and its contribution of the art and design world. I went to view some art gallery’s which were almost like the real deal, even with some background music within entrance of the gallery door.

Added are some screenshots i took during my experience of the gallery and some personal favourites.

I messaged one of the artists of a piece and asked them what they liked about their virtual gallery and she replied “A great advantage i found that for an artist we can profit from these pieces and make money in the real world also connect people from all around the world”