Research Interests:

Instructional Technology/Educational Psychology, games and learning, online learning, design based research, digital scholarship, history and science education, research tools

Education:

Ph.D Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology, George Mason University, in progress (2009-2012, expected)

M.A. History and New Media, George Mason University, 2009

B.A. History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006

Peer Reviewed Articles

Owens, T. J. (in press). Madame Curie above the fold: Divergent perspectives on Curie’s visit to the United States in the American press. Science Communication.

Owens, T. J. (in press). Tripadvisor Rates Einstein: Using the social web to unpack the public meanings of a cultural heritage site. The International Journal of Web Based Communities.

Owens, T. (in press). Modding the history of science: Values at play in modder discussions of Sid Meier’s Civilization. Simulation & Gaming. doi: 10.1177/1046878110366277

Owens, T. (2009). Going to school with Madame Curie and Mr. Einstein: Gender roles in children’s science biographies. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 4(4), 929-943. doi: 10.1007/s11422-009-9177-6

Book:

Owens, T. (2010). Fairfax County: A Postcard History Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub.

Book Chapters, Conference Proceedings and Encyclopedia Entries

Owens, T. J. (in press) Becoming storytellers and game makers: Learning to compose games in the RPG maker community. In M. S. S. Johnson, R. Colby, & R. Colby (Eds.), Rhetoric/Composition/Play: How Electronic Games Mediate Composition Theory and Practice (and Vice Versa).

Owens, T. J. (in press) Lego, handcraft, and costumed zombies: How Flickr community members use the zombie metaphor. In S. Boluk & W. Lenz (Eds.), Discourses of the Living Dead. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Owens, T. J, Chmiel, M. (in press) Religion in a civilized world: Understanding the role of religion in Sid Meier’s Civilization. In T. Teofilo (Ed.), Religion in Popular Media.

Owens, T. (in press). Book communities. In G. Barnett (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Networking. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Owens, T. (2008). Zotero: Making student research transparent. In Peterson, (Ed.),  Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning (pp. 258-262). Madison WI. http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference/Resource_library/proceedings/08_12943.pdf

Chmiel, M., & Owens, T. (2006). Anti-evolution literature and its hidden pedagogical value: Confronting the creationism dilemma. In Osborne,J (Ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International History, Philosophy, and Sociology in Science Teaching Conference (pp. 50-51). Leeds, UK. http://www.ihpst2005.leeds.ac.uk/papers/Chmiel_Owens.pdf

Peer Reviewed Conference Presentations

Owens, T. J. (2010, June). Divergent Design Competence in the RPG Maker Community. Presented at the Games + Learning + Society Conference. Madison, WI

Owens, T. (2008, November). The face of American science: Exploring the history of the National Academy of Sciences Einstein Memorial. Presented at the 35th Annual Conference on Washington, D.C. Historical Studies, Washington, DC.

Owens, T. (2007, April). Climbing our family tree: The untimely birth of children’s books about evolution, 1920-1955. Presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Il.

Owens, T., & Chmiel, M. (2006, April). Mapping the landscape of gender in science through children’s biographies of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. Presented at the National Association of Research in Science Teaching Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA.

Owens, T. (2006, November). Going to school with Curie and Einstein: Gendering the history and nature of science. Presented at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society, Vancouver, British Columbia

Conference Sessions

Owens, T. J., Boggs, J., Brennan, S., Graham, W., & Gilbert, J. (2010, April). Digital Tools for Historians. Presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. Washington, DC.

Owens, T., Lester, D., Boggs, J. (2009, November). Three free, open source, extensible platforms for creating collaborative learning communities. Presented at Educause, Denver, CO.

Schrum, K., Boggs, J., Owens, T., Albers, K., Reeder, J., & Shepherd, A. (2009, October). Teaching and learning in the digital age. Presented at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society, Philadelphia, PA.

Owens, T., Ghajar, L. A., Boggs, J., & Lester, D. (June, 2009). Free digital tools to inspire student learning. Presented at the National Education Computing Conference, Fairfax, VA.

Owens, T., & Lester, D. (2009, June). Three free, open source, extensible platforms for creating collaborative learning communities. Presented at the 5th annual Innovations in eLearning Symposium, Fairfax, VA.

Owens, T. (2009, May). Putting Zotero to work: Free and open source research management for you and your institution. Presented at MCEtech, Ottawa, Ontario.

Owens, T. (2008, June). Zotero: A platform for new modes of research collaboration. Presented at the 4th Annual Innovations in eLearning Symposium, Fairfax, VA.

Owens, T. (2008, April). Playing history: Let’s build an open collaborative repository of historical games. Presented at the Frontiers in Digital History Conference, Fairfax, VA.

Owens, T. (2008, February). Zotero and you, or bibliography on the semantic web. Presented at the Code4lib conference, Portland, OR.

Owens, T. (2007, October). There has to be a better way: Zotero and research 2.0. Presented at Educause, Seattle, WA.

Owens, T. (2007, November). Zotero: new features and what’s to come. Presented at the Digital Library Federation Fall Forum, Philadelphia, PA.

Owens, T. (2006, April). Built by historians, for historians: Using Zotero for your research. Presented at the American Association for History and Computing Conference, Providence, RI.

Owens, T. (2006, June). Zotero and research 2.0: Managing your research in your browser. Presented at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference, Indianapolis, IN.

K-16 Educator Workshops:

Chmiel, M., & Owens, T. J. (2010, June). Gaming Across the Curriculum: Finding and Evaluating Educational Games. Presented at the International Society for Technology in Education Conference, Denver, CO.

Owens, T. J. (2010, June). Free and Easy Bibliography: Scaffolding Student Research with Zotero. Presented at the International Society for Technology in Education Conference, Denver, CO.

Boggs, J., Cohen, D. J., McClurken, J., Owens, T. J., Schrum, K., & Groom, J. (2010, January). Humanities in the Digital Age. Presented at the 125th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, San Diego, CA.

Owens, T. J. (2010, March). Publish, Share, Collaborate, and Crowdsource Collections: Zotero 2.0 For Public Historians. Presented at the National Council on Public History Annual Meeting, Portland, OR.

Owens, T. (2009, July) Zotero trainer workshop. Hosted by Emory University, Atlanta GA.

Owens, T (2009, January) Zotero trainer workshop. Hosted by George Mason University, Fairfax VA.

Owens, T. (2009, May). Gathering, organizing, annotating, and publishing humanities scholarship with Zotero. Part of Rutgers University’s New Media Boot Camp, Rutgers, NJ.

Owens, T. (2008, June). Using Zotero in the high school classroom. Presented at the Jefferson Overseas International School Training Institute, Fairfax, VA.

Owens, T. (2008,  June) Making bibliography easy for high school history students. National History Day, College Park, MD.

Owens, T. (2008, May) Zotero in the writing classroom. Computers and Writing Conference, Athens GA,

Owens, T. (2008, April) Implementing Zotero in your school library. Fairfax County Schools Head Librarian Bi-Annual Summit, Fairfax Va,

Owens, T. , Kornblith, S., Krishnan, S.  (2008, February) Hacking Zotero: How to build translators, citation styles and otherwise extend the Zotero platform. Code4lib, Portland, OR.

Owens, T. (2007, April) Building A better bibliography with Zotero. George Washington University’s American Studies department, Washington DC.

Owens, T. (2007, April) Using Zotero in your daily research. Brown’s History and American Civilization departments, April 18th 2007

Owens, T. (2007, October) How to Zotero. University of Washington’s History Department, Seattle, WA.

Teaching, Instruction, and Advising Experience

2006-2010 Instructional designer and lead trainer: Center for History and New Media (CHNM): Developed multi-media online learning materials and face-to-face workshops for Zotero, an Open Source research tool used by both professionals and in K-16.

2005-2006 Academic councilor: University of Wisconsin: Advised incoming University of Wisconsin College of Letters and Science freshmen students.

2004-2005 Literacy Coach: Teach For America: Mentor for the Teach for America after-school program at Shank Elementary in Madison Wisconsin.

Awards and Recognition for Research and Development

2009 C.W. Bright Pixel Prize For New Media History Project: Awarded for developing playinghistory.org, a free and open collaborative directory of online historical games.

2009 Research Fellowship: fellow with Duke University’s Humanities, Arts and Science, Advanced Technological Colaboratory,

2006 The Ruth Knatz Memorial Fund $3,000: Granted by the University of Wisconsin Integrated Liberal Studies department to one graduating senior for interdisciplinary work in the humanities

2006 National Science Foundation Travel Grant: Awarded for travel expenses to the History of Science Society’s Annual Meeting

2005 Tricia Nordby Hamrin Research Award $2,500: Awarded by the Honors department for work on senior thesis entitled “A child’s eye view of life as a scientist: A history of biographies of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein written for children”

Participation: Grant Funded Research and Development

2010 One Week, One Tool: A Digital Humanities Barn Raising: a one week institute for twelve participants on the principles of humanities-centered tool design, development, and implementation, followed by a year of development support. Funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Program. Role: Community Development Specialist Project Director: Tom Scheinfeldt

2008-2010 Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research With Text-Mining and Analysis Tools a two-year study of the potential of text-mining tools for historical and humanities scholarship. As program manager I worked to design, conduct and analyze a survey of historians to examine their use of digital resources and prospect for particularly helpful uses of digital technology. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Project Director Daniel Cohen Role: Program Manager

2006- 2010 Zotero, an open-source research tool now used by hundreds of thousands of scholars. Project supported by several grants.

Zotero Commons, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2008-2009;

Zotero 2.0, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2006-2008;

Zotero 1.0, funding from Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2006-2007

Role: Community Lead Project Director: Daniel Cohen

Professional Service

2009-2012 Executive Board Member American Association for History and Computing

2009-2012 George Mason University Campus Liaison, American Educational Research Association

2009 National History Day Judge: Senior level historical websites

2005-2006 Outreach Coordinator: Games Learning, and Society Conference

Reviewer, International Conference on The Learning Sciences, 2010

Reviewer, annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, 2006

Reviewer, American Educational Research Association Conference, 2006

Reviewer, Public Understanding of Science, 2010