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.
SEARCH
Bio
Photos
Status
- 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.
Tags
albert einstein
atomic
books
catalog
children's books
Children's Literature
chnm
Citizendium
Comics
copyleft
copyright
DC
design
Digital History
digital literacy
Education
educational games
Firstpast
game design
Games
Gender
History
History of Science
howto
lameness
learning
library
marie curie
omeka
organize
Playing History
playinghistory
programing
public history
RPG Maker
Science
serious games
Site Review
swivel
tech tree
Video Games
visualization
Wikipedia
worldcat
zotero
Digital Tools
Creating History In New Media
Monday, January 26th, 2009I am excited to taking Jeremy Boggs course “Creating History In New Media” to round out my MA in American History. The syllabus is pretty exciting, if a bit overwhelming, mix of tech skills (HTML, CSS and using WordPress and Omeka) with readings in project management and process for web design. If your into this [...]
Keep Reading » 7Export from Zotero to Librarything or Goodreads
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008One of Zotero’s many virtues is that it is a really robust container for bibliographic data. If you want to spend a little time playing with the Citation Style Language that Zotero uses it is actually pretty easy to get some useful data out of Zotero to do all sorts of fun things with. One [...]
Keep Reading » 0Making Book Labels With Zotero
Monday, November 24th, 2008To the left you can see a sample of some of my labeled books. It may not be particularly pretty, but those labels do exactly what I wan them to do. Display information, have only a limited chance to damage my books, and cost me practically nothing. In this post I will walk through how [...]
Keep Reading » 0Cataloging Our Library in Zotero
Friday, November 14th, 2008Before starting my home cataloging project I really only used Zotero to grab individual items, this was my first time trying to look-up large numbers of items at once. I am happy to report that I came up with a work flow that let me run through about fifty books every ten minutes. I found [...]
Keep Reading » 0Using Zotero as a Personal Library Catalog
Sunday, November 9th, 2008My wife and I have a lot of books, tons of books. So many books that I am sometimes surprised to find books I didn’t even know we had. Over the years I have tried to organize them in ways that make sense to me. This approach has failed utterly and completely. I have now [...]
Keep Reading » 6Darwin Quest RPG: Making Historical RPGs for Almost Nothing
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008Last Friday I was excited to rediscover RPG Maker, a windows only, no-programing skills necessary, platform for building role playing games. The tool allows you to create games with the look and feel of mid-nineties Super Nintendo Games like Final Fantasy VI, Breath of Fire, or EarthBound. As an avid gamer and proto-historian I was [...]
Keep Reading » 4Free Omeka Theme
Friday, June 20th, 2008I am excited to unveil my first attempt at playing with CSS for Omeka themes. I have been meaning to get more practice with vaguely technical things and my first priority is getting better acquainted with our friend the cascading style sheet. As my first Omeka theme I decided not to do anything particularly fancy. [...]
Keep Reading » 0Conversation Piece For THATCamp
Saturday, May 31st, 2008This is just a quick post to get out a first pass at a rubric for assessing games for use in history classrooms for THATCamp. Click the image to see a bigger, more readable version. Most approaches to evaluating games, or at least most of the approaches I have come across are not discipline specific, [...]
Keep Reading » 0Sunrise on Methodology and Radical Transparency of Sources in Historical Writing
Saturday, March 15th, 2008Earlier this week Tom Scheinfeldt, of Found History suggested that the historical profession could well be moving in a new direction. For quite sometime historians have been concerned with questions of ideology, arguments about which historical-isms are the best for a given task. Tom, suggests that new media tools (like text mining) challenge historians to [...]
Keep Reading » 6Another way to count the books
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007I asked a sociologist why there are more kids books about Curie than Einstein. He looked puzzled for a moment and then responded, “Of course! If your going to write a book about a scientist for girls you don’t have that many options, but if you are writing a book for boys there are so [...]
Keep Reading » 0