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

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, 2009

It’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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Distributed Research Tool Instruction: Think Interlibrary Loan for Training

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

The 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, 2009

This 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, 2009

A 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 [...]

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Marie Curie on Ada Lovelace Day

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Today is Ada Lovelace Day,  an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. From their website, ‘Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.” I think the day is a great idea, and it [...]

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Sitemaps and Wireframes: Playing History

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Tonight in my Creating History with New Media class were workshoping our sitemaps and wireframes. I worked these up a few weeks ago, before we started building the live site, so some of this has already changed, but it is still worth sharing as part of the process. See the wireframe shots below.

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Omeka Not Just For Exhibits: Using Omeka To Build A Colaborative Directory

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

While Omeka is billed as a CMS for exhibiting cultural heritage projects it’s also a awesome platform for publishing collections of all sorts of stuff with rich metadata. Jim and I have been cracking away on our Playing History project and I thought I would share some of our experience working with and modifying Omeka [...]

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Strategy and Scope: Readings In Digital Humanities Project Management

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

One 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. [...]

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Recap from first Triannual Zotero Trainers Workshop

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Last 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 [...]

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A Few More Site Ideas For Playing History: This Time From Mega Man

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

One 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 [...]

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