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: 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.
- tjowens: Just got into Seattle. Getting things together for the Zotero workshop tomorrow.
Science
Marie Curie on Ada Lovelace Day
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Today 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 [...]
Keep Reading » 2Science 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 » 6Disney Goes Atomic
Friday, June 20th, 2008In 1956 Disney published Our Friend the Atom as a compliment to a film and exhibition by the same name. The book uses a fable of a fishermen and a genie to explain the relation between people and atomic science, and the book strangely simultaneously offers much scarier visuals of the destructive power of atomic [...]
Keep Reading » 01934: A Better Time to Be A Girl Interested in Science?
Thursday, May 8th, 2008In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Nature Study was the cutting edge approach in American science education. Educational scholars claimed students should “study nature, not books” and education took on a much more practical bent. Some scholars have noted that this approach to science education was much more gender inclusive, that nature study [...]
Keep Reading » 0Suprises in Early Children’s Books About Evolution
Thursday, April 17th, 2008From the Scopes to Dover Area School District teaching evolution continues to be a perennial sore spot in American education. More often than not textbooks are at the center of these controversies. There are several excellent studies of the history of Evolution in text books. In Trial and Error Edward Larson argued that the [...]
Keep Reading » 2Another way to count the books
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007I asked a sociologist why there are more kids books about Curie than Einstein. He looked puzzled for a moment and then responded, “Of course! If your going to write a book about a scientist for girls you don’t have that many options, but if you are writing a book for boys there are so [...]
Keep Reading » 0Why Historians Need to Be More Interested With Children’s Literature
Saturday, December 1st, 2007One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong. This picture from the 1976 children’s book The Value of Learning: The Story of Marie Curie depicts the resolute young Curie standing her ground against a visiting Russian school inspector. (I have posted about this confrontation before) It is [...]
Keep Reading » 0Children’s Books By The Numbers: Or Two Things I Learned From Franco Moretti
Friday, November 16th, 2007A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs Maps and Trees. If you haven’t read it I highly recommend it as a truly compelling exploration of what individuals interested in the history of literature can glean by counting. After a bit of thought I am confident that some of [...]
Keep Reading » 0How Research Databases Changed My Life!
Sunday, November 11th, 2007Does anyone else remember the joy of the first moment when you realized what Proquest’s Historical New York Times does? Sitting in a library resource presentation, the librarian clicked in the little search box and in a few seconds was searching the entire full text of the hundred some years of history of the New [...]
Keep Reading » 0Curie and Einstein Go To School
Sunday, September 30th, 2007These are two of my favorite pictures from my research on children’s books about Einstein and Curie. (You can click on them to see the bigger images). They are I think, the most visual example of my thesis’s argument and I think they are also illustrative of exactly what we need to pay [...]
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