Dan Cox

I often lead with calling myself an “independent developer.” It’s a nice way of explaining that, while I often make things in digital spaces, I’ve rarely worked in a professional capacity while doing it, and often fund my own experiments myself. It also works well to introduce my GitHub portfolio and the open source projects I’ve contributed to in the past, too.

Some more recent (and silly) examples of the types of things I generate include “Shantal or Jesus? A quiz game” and Rumors About Dan.com.

Education:

B.S., Major Computer Science, Minor English, Old Dominion University, Fall 2013
M.A., Rhetoric and Composition, Old Dominion University, Spring 2016

Research:

In the past, I’ve been part of a semester-long research project studying mobile device usage in learning spaces and have worked to analyze the situating practices of assignment prompts generated from ODU’s QEP IDW program.

I’m personally interested in the intersection of instructional design and the increasing trends of gamification across many domains. Central to this exploration on my own time has been my on-going, weekly series of videos on using the software Twine and my many how-to guides on my personal blog.

Teaching:

While I have never taught a class myself, I have considerable teaching assistant experience through being attached to CS300T for two semesters and CS411W for three semesters. I’ve also participated in (Fall 2013) and observed (Spring 2015) two different QEP week-long sessions at ODU.

Goals:

Currently, my intention is to finish my Masters within the next year and move on to a PhD program with either an emphasis in Digital Humanities or Game Studies. Most of my personal work previous to graduate school has been based in either writing about or creating game-based artifacts and I have recently taken an interest in combining these skills with pedagogical approaches in trying to teach material in newer and often more dynamic ways.