I am the community lead for the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. I am interested in open source platforms for learning and research, games and learning, and the history of science education. Before coming to the CHNM I worked for the Games, Learning, and Society Conference.
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- tjowens: Civ City: Rome more fun than I thought. Neat to see your citizens living their lives. Still, games about logistics get monotonous fast
- tjowens: So far #oneweek one tool http://bit.ly/bQ0XwU is infinitely better than the competing #toolacademy http://bit.ly/dbEF9r
- tjowens: Day so far; Castle Crashers, coffee, vinyasa, Assassin's Creed. Up next; sandwich, trader joes, write proposal, dinner and movie
- tjowens: @briancroxall it is! Also, the diversity of the session formats at GLS really keeps it interesting. Great model to follow.
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Teaching with RPG Maker: Interview with Caleb Gentry
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010I had a ton of fun talking to folks about my research on RPG Maker at the Games Learning and Society Conference last month. I am a big fan of the opportunity for conversation that poster sessions provide. I expected most people that visited my poster would be unfamiliar with RPG Maker and the community. [...]
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Divergent Design Competence in the RPG Maker Community: GLS Presentation
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010I am thrilled to be back in Madison, if only for a few days, for the Games Learning and Society conference. Now in it’s 6th year, it is very cool to see how much the conference has grown and matured since I worked on the first two years of the conferences organizing committee. This year [...]
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Read My Article On Civ Modders in the Journal Simulation & Gaming
Thursday, May 27th, 2010I am excited to announce that an article I wrote about how the game Civilization modders, players that edit and alter the game’s code, is now available as OnlineFirst through Sage. The project was a ton of fun and I hope it sparks some good conversations. You can find the abstract bellow. Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION [...]
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The Interest Driven Curriculum and Online Affinity Communities
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010The more I explore informal affinity communities, like the Civ modder community, or the RPG Maker Community, the more intriguing I find them. While the communities are themselves interesting, I think there are lessons in these spaces for rethinking more formal learning environments. This post is an attempt to refine some of this line of [...]
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So Who Are the RPG Makers? Preliminary Survey Results
Saturday, March 6th, 2010I am excited to report that i have finished gathering data from my RPG Maker VX community survey and am well on the way toward finishing interviews with a subset of the respondents. For more information about this project see my previous post. At this point I thought I would share a cursory overview of [...]
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Becoming Storytellers and Game Makers in the RPG Maker VX Community
Friday, February 5th, 2010A while back, I wrote a post about a very neat piece of software called RPG Maker. I never really got to building a game with it, but I have become fascinated with the community that has come together around the software. This post begins a series of entries about a research project I have [...]
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Evolution in Spore: A Case Study in Player Agency
Monday, January 11th, 2010Spore is not a good game for learning about evolution. As many have eloquently articulated the games mechanics clearly place the player in the role of intelligent designer. With that said, I think this case provides an interesting moment to explore the relationship between the role the game puts players in and what players do [...]
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Autotune for science, or when youtube got smart
Saturday, November 7th, 2009When I first stumbled across Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed) I thought I would find a quick laugh, instead I found something profoundly moving. This autotuned mash-up of documentary footage ends up leaving viewers feeling much of the awe which so much of formal science education fails to communicate. [...]
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Mining Old News For Fresh Historcal Insight
Friday, September 4th, 2009This week I had the honor of participating in the Library of Congress’ national strategy for digital news summit. The Library gathered together a diverse mix of corporate and public archivists, representatives from public and private foundations, and librarians to discuss the digital future of news. The conversations focused on both how to preserve born [...]
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A Walk Down Edutainment Lane: Or, What Target Taught Me About Serious Games
Saturday, July 11th, 2009Apparently war game sims sell, even oldish ones. Last weekend I took a quick walk through the games section of our local Target to see what new Wii and DS games looked fun. After picking up a copy of Cooking Mama, I took a gander at some of the games on the next row of [...]
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