Jim Groom

Jim Groom is the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting, an independent web hosting company focused on the higher education community. Previously he was the Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

He has been working for over twenty years in higher education with a consistent focus on the development of teaching and learning in higher education. In addition to extensive experience teaching at the college level, for the past ten years her has worked primarily in the field of instructional technology (see work experience).

His experience as an instructor coupled with extensive collaborations with faculty and students with a specific focus on curricula, pedagogical and technologically enhanced projects has informed much of the innovative work he’s been a part of in the field of instructional technology over the last decade.

He has been part of a number of exciting projects at the University of Mary Washington. In 2006 he started the web-based educational publishing platform ELS Blogs for the English Linguistics and Speech department at UMW. This pilot project led to the development of UMW Blogs in 2007 which has since become an enterprise level academic publishing platform. In 2008 the madness that was EDUPUNK was attributed to a series of posts he wrote on his personal blog.

In 2010 he re-imagined the Computer Science 106 course on Digital Storytelling at UMW as an open, online community referred to as ds106—an experiment in teaching and learning on the web that is still going strong and has been celebrated internationally as a compelling community-based approach to online learning. Additionally, he also helped spearhead an initiative at the University of Mary Washington called A Domain of One’s Own that, starting in Fall 2013, provided all incoming Freshman their own domain and web hosting account.

Finally, he writes regularly about his work as an instructional technologist–in addition to several other interests such as film, literature, and media of all kinds–on his home away from home:bavatuesdays.com.

[Image credit: CC-BY-SA-NC mikhailgershovich https://flic.kr/p/9JucRU]