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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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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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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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 [...]
Keep Reading » 5Why we need to Play History
Sunday, November 18th, 2007In the last few years there has been a wealth of interest in games for learning. A growing body of research on the educational value of games underlines the ways the can engage students like no previous media. There are now conferences and journals dedicated to games and learning, the MacArthur foundation last year granted [...]
Keep Reading » 5Term Paper 2.0: Reinventing The College Essay Via Wikipidia
Friday, October 26th, 2007I just got out of a great session at Educause that I thought would add another wrinkle to earlier discussions of the value of Wikipedia. The two speakers Andreas Brockhaus and Martha Groom, had students in a environmental biology class write or significaltly edit Wikipedia articles in lue of a traditional essay assignment. (The full [...]
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