Jim Groom

Jim Groom

I am the director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I have been working for over fifteen years in education with a consistent focus on the development of teaching and learning in higher education. In addition to my extensive experience teaching at the college level, for the past nine years I have worked primarily in the field of instructional technology (see work experience).

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

I have been part of a number of exciting projects at the University of Mary Washington. In 2006 I 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 I wrote on my personal blog.

In 2010 I 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, I am currently part of an initiative at the University of Mary Washington called A Domain of One’s Own that, starting in Fall 2013, will give all incoming Freshman their own domain and web hosting account. You can see more of my projects here.

For a clearer picture of my approach to teaching and learning technologies in higher education take a look at a selection of presentations and interviews I have given over the past eight years.

Finally, I write regularly about my work as an instructional technologist–in addition to several other interests of mine such as film, literature, and media of all kinds–on my home away from home: bavatuesdays.