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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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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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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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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