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: @briancroxall there is a leave group link below in the right column of each groups page
- tjowens: this can't be serious... Winter Storm Warning for Fairfax, VA 10 to 20 inches of snow tomorrow http://bit.ly/cSJjfB
- tjowens: Positive outcome of #snowpocalypse : being traped in our hose got me to file our taxes
- tjowens: Would love input on my new research project "Becoming Storytellers and Game Makers in the RPG Maker VX Community" http://bit.ly/diapZw
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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Simulation As A Way of Knowing: First Reflections on Will Wright’s Keynote at the 5th Annual Innovations in e-Learning Conference.
Thursday, June 4th, 2009It’s not everyday that one gets to swoon as a big time fan boy. Will Wright spoke at the Innovations and e-Learning Symposium and I had the chance to stake out a spot right in the center of the room and soak up a bit of Wright’s visionary gamer visions. Beyond making some of the [...]
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Distributed Research Tool Instruction: Think Interlibrary Loan for Training
Sunday, May 17th, 2009The ever growing heap of neat digital research tools is simultaneously fascinating and problematic. Some of this stuff really has the potential to be transformational, to provide new avenues for scholarship, and teaching, but the sheer quantity of tools makes it a bit difficult for scholars and teachers to know where to start from, and [...]
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Design Rationale: Playing History
Monday, April 6th, 2009This week in Clio Wired: Creating History With New Media each of my classmatees has been diligently working on composing a design rationale for each of our projects. Below is my rationalization. You can also view it as this PDF.
Design Rationale Playing History
Related to this I thought folks might be interested in the slides for [...]
Re-mixing The Tech Tree: Build Your Own History Of Science
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009A few weeks back Rob Macdougall posted a great essay about using the game Civilization’s approach to the history of science and technology as a point of entry into conversations about models for representing the history of science and technology more broadly. Rob’s students picked apart the way the game allows players to develop science [...]
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Marie Curie on Ada Lovelace Day
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. From their website, ‘Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.” I think the day is a great idea, and it [...]
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