Seton Hill University Recognized By Apple

Seton Hill University has been named an Apple Distinguished Program for its success in enhancing and extending teaching and learning with thoughtful and innovative implementations of technology. The Apple Distinguished Program designation is reserved for programs that are recognized centers of educational excellence and leadership. —Seton Hill University – A Leading Catholic Liberal Arts University…

The Horror… The Horror! How Music in Horror Games Effects Player Experience

From one of my students, a blog-based presentation on music in horror games. Regardless, safety in ARG’s may not necessarily diminish the game’s terror-effects. Many horror movies and games are based upon the principles of Freud’s theory of The Uncanny, or what makes something scary (Helene Cixous, a literary critic, gives an advanced yet interesting…

The New York Times public editor’s very public utterance

Now, it’s worth noting that Brisbane’s question makes perfect sense, considered from the newsroom’s perspective. Romney’s claim that Obama makes speeches “apologising” for America isn’t readily amenable to fact-checking. Instead, Romney relied on what are sometimes called “weasel words”, in which an allegation is alluded to, without being made head-on. (Romney, for instance, never quotes…

Birthplace of a Robot

Not quite as dramatic as the creation of the evil robotess Maria (in the 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis), but more educational. Kids and some dads from my son’s FIRST Robotics Competition club discuss strategy. I’m blogging the process; soon I hope to get the kids involved, but for understandable reasons, they are mostly interested…

Maya Angelou says King memorial inscription makes him look ‘arrogant’ – The Washington Post

The sermon was so powerful that the designers of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington selected those lines to be inscribed on the memorial’s towering statue of the civil rights leader. But because of a design change during the statue’s creation, the exact quotes had to be paraphrased, and now one of the…

Nicholas Carr on E-Books

The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits…

Digital Humanities; the Electric Icebox of the MLA

If you can’t code, can critique produce new knowledge in digital humanities? Like the PowerPoint templates that emulate chalkboards, or the 3.5-inch diskette that often still decorates the “save” button in apps used by people who never touch floppy disks, the very term “digital humanities” exemplifies the debate. It’s a transitory term, like “electric icebox,”…

Emerging Genres, Progressive Readings: Games, Fiction, and Narrative Play

Despite the fact that some computer games are clearly a site of narrative production and consumption, the relationship between narrative, on the one hand, and games, on the other, has remained somewhat uneasy, if not contentious, within the critical literature for both game studies & narrative theory. —Emerging Genres, Progressive Readings: Games, Fiction, and Narrative…