Bio

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.

Photos

saright saright cabin trevor Boy meets Dolly Parton tapestry From Trevor and Marjee I covet toys Classic Style Bowser peaks Patrick Gives Dolly Two Thumbs Up

Digital Tools

Creating History In New Media

Monday, January 26th, 2009

I 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 [...]

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Export from Zotero to Librarything or Goodreads

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

One 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 [...]

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Making Book Labels With Zotero

Monday, November 24th, 2008

To 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 [...]

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Cataloging Our Library in Zotero

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Before 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 [...]

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Using Zotero as a Personal Library Catalog

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

My 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 [...]

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Darwin Quest RPG: Making Historical RPGs for Almost Nothing

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Last 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 [...]

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Free Omeka Theme

Friday, June 20th, 2008

I 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. [...]

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Conversation Piece For THATCamp

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

This 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, [...]

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Sunrise on Methodology and Radical Transparency of Sources in Historical Writing

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Earlier 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 [...]

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Another way to count the books

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

I 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 [...]

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