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: Just landed in Portland for #ncph third visit to the west coast in so many months.
- tjowens: thoroughly enjoyed "Trailer For Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever " http://bit.ly/aXw3nZ
- tjowens: Just posted some preliminary results from my survey of the RPG Maker Community http://bit.ly/c6qhm5 (having a ton of fun with this project)
- tjowens: Becoming a fan http://becomeadfan.ytmnd.com/ It is always good to see YTMND deliver exactly what YTMND is supposed to deliver.
Games
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 [...]
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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 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 [...]
Keep Reading » 1Strategy and Scope: Readings In Digital Humanities Project Management
Saturday, March 7th, 2009One of the first steps in constructing a digital humanities project is to define your strategy and project scope. This week in our creating history and new media class we had a great discussion about a topic most of the class had not really considered, what I would call project management in the digital humanities. [...]
Keep Reading » 1A Few More Site Ideas For Playing History: This Time From Mega Man
Monday, February 23rd, 2009One more round of site theme ideas. I think I might really like this round. Do folks like these more or less then the last batch? I did not fill in all the content for these, just a few boxes and headings to give a sense of the concept. Each of them would take a [...]
Keep Reading » 3Science Grows On Trees: The History of Science and Technology Acording to Video Games
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009I think historians and sociologists of science might be surprised to learn that video game designers spend a considerable amount of time and energy building playable models of the history of science and technology. In game design circles these systems are commonly referred to as “Technology Trees“. Below is an example of one of these [...]
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