3 Jim Groom
Epiphanies from the Field, March 4th 2022
Fireside Guest – Jim Groom
In academia, Jim was a part time faculty and director of the Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington. While there, he founded the Domain of One’s Own project adopted by a number of universities and created the #ds106 digital storytelling course that has been taught by colleges for the last 14 years or so. He is the co-owner of Reclaim Hosting, a venue we, and our students, have access to here at UW.
Jim’s work includes the following: Reclaim Hosting – Ds106 – Educause Work – TEDx – TEDx #2
“Starting now. A technology that allows for limitless reproduction of knowledge resources, instantaneous global sharing and cooperation, and all the powerful benefits of digital manipulation, recombination, and computation must be a “bag of gold” for scholarship and for learning. It is well within the power of educators to play a decisive role in the battle for the future of the web. Doing so will require the courage to buck prevailing trends. It will require an at-times inconvenient commitment to the fundamental principles of openness, ownership, and participation. It will require hard work, creativity, and a spirit of fun.” Jim Groom, Reclaiming Innovation
Here are Jim’s thoughts about our hour and below is a recording of the event.
https://bava.tv/videos/embed/f406b38f-8787-40e1-bf8d-93f72033c520
Susan
These are some of the highlights from my notes from Jim Groom’s talk.
Importance: giving students voice and platform to share work.
Epiphanies:
- Content could be reproduced between different platforms.
- Having his own archive and connecting with other people was important. Before, teaching was a solo act. Then I opened the door a bit and all these brilliant people were teaching my students–it was awesome–for my students, for me, and for others who could use our work as a model. One model was DS106, a course Jim originally created while working at U Maryland-Washington.
Implementation:
- Jim used a #URL that students would use as a tag to get work to the course site.
- Jane contributed that she had a course site with student blogs feeding into the course site. Each URL was put into a folder on a feed reader, which she used to check on work, reading and commenting (http://janevangalen.com/568/)
Challenges:
- Jim: EduGlue crashed into Twitter and Facebook as AP1 replaced RSS, which had made sharing easy.
- Chris added later that we’ve been very tied into the written word but that now video is opening up new options (“Closing of Guttenberg parenthesis”). There are problems of mass media and scale. The future is a 3rd space. What is it? Don’t know–we’re making it.
- Jim added that one way of moving forward was to refocus scale, for example on smaller communities such as our university or even our little LC.
Reflection: Reading Ko’s comments reminds me that I am in this learning community because I am interested in learning how to develop course projects (a