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: 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.
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Working With Colors And Style For playinghistory.org
Thursday, February 19th, 2009I realize I am getting a bit ahead of myself but I get excited about playing with the visual style of the project. Which do you think are the best? Or should I just scrap it and do something completely different?
Keep Reading » 8Darwin, History, and Visualizations
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Two weeks ago our Creating History in New Media class had a great chance to chat with historian David Staley about his book Computers Visualization and History and Scott McCloud‘s book Understanding Comics. New media provides some exciting places to take conversations about visualizations in history, but one of my other take-a-ways from the conversation [...]
Keep Reading » 1Science 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 [...]
Keep Reading » 7Visualization and History: Hint, It’s Not About Pictures
Sunday, February 1st, 2009If your into history and computers, and looking for a mildly trippy read, break open a bottle of wine and spend three of four hours reading through David Staley’s Computers Visualization and History. Staley’s central, somewhat provocative, contention is that there is nothing natural or automatic about historians choice to communicate through writing. Like some [...]
Keep Reading » 013 Free Online History Games
Thursday, January 29th, 2009This is a quick smattering from the hundreds of different free online history games and interactives I have come across. This slice of the history games web underscores a few key points behind building the Playing History collaborative directory. First, the list gives a quick sense of the different diversity of groups making history games. [...]
Keep Reading » 0Creating 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 » 7New Genre: Non-Fiction Video Games
Friday, January 23rd, 2009I think our games vocabulary is a bit impoverished. When most people think of games they think of fictional, often fantastic stories. Killing elves, post apocalyptic settings, shooting up all sorts of big bads. But games can also offer interesting ways to engage with the real world. To borrow a word from print I think [...]
Keep Reading » 0Scientists in Action: Front Door Iconography At The National Academy Of Sciences
Saturday, January 10th, 2009As I’ve mentioned before I have been looking at the Einstein memorial on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences as a interesting spot to think about science in public. In working on the project I have been trying to find points of comparison, other statues of scientists or presentations of scientists, ideally in [...]
Keep Reading » 1Export 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 » 0£very1 c4n |_rn 2 ©ode (Everyone Learn to Code)
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008How Do We Get The Necessary Self Efficacy To Code For all the talk of read/write culture and how digital media has blurred the lines between producer and consumer, (or even prosumer if you like making up words) there is much less conversation about learning to write code. In my experience these conversations happen, almost [...]
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