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: @samplereality Apparently every address I have been associated with does not contain enough information. How should that make me feel?
- tjowens: I just can't understand how each Pokemon can talk to eachother only using the syllables of their own names @clioweb
- tjowens: 14 days left to submit proposals to the American Association for History and Computing's conference http://bit.ly/bE2zdv Tell everyone!
- tjowens: @retius @missmodular Indeed. As @jamespaulgee suggests most learning is more like games and less like classrooms http://bit.ly/9lzt1E
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Digital Tools
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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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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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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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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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 [...]
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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 [...]
Keep Reading » 1Recap from first Triannual Zotero Trainers Workshop
Sunday, March 1st, 2009Last week I had the pleasure of running the first in Zotero’s triannual (that’s three times a year) workshops for Zotero trainers (looking for a better name for “trainer”). I had a great time, and I think everyone left with a nice balance of practical next-steps for making Zotero work at their own institutions and [...]
Keep Reading » 1Visualization and History: Hint, It’s Not About Pictures
Sunday, February 1st, 2009If your into history and computers, and looking for a mildly trippy read, break open a bottle of wine and spend three of four hours reading through David Staley’s Computers Visualization and History. Staley’s central, somewhat provocative, contention is that there is nothing natural or automatic about historians choice to communicate through writing. Like some [...]
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