Jim Groom, executive director of teaching and learning technologies, presented the keynote at the University of Oklahoma’s 2015 Academic Technology Expo discussing the vision undergirding the Domain of One’s Own initiative that originated at UMW. The presentation, “Domain of One’s Own: Digital Agency in the 21st Century,” explored the importance of providing students, faculty, and staff with an innovative, web-based platform for owning, managing and migrating the digital work they create over the course of their academic careers.

Since early March of 2014 Jim Groom has delivered numerous invited presentations about the work the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) has been doing with Domain of One’s Own.

On March 6 Groom delivered a featured session at the 2014 Digital Media Learning Conference in Boston, Mass. focused around the theme of Connected Practices. The presentation was titled “Domain of One’s Own: Notes from the Trailing Edge,” and it delves into the question of why higher ed has turned its back on the web for teaching and learning, an invention it in many ways made possible. Here’s an extended post framing the thinking behind this presentation, and there is also an archived video of this presentation below (the Domain of One’s Own discussion starts at minute 32:00).

On March 14 Groom was invited to deliver the keynote presentation at UMW’s 4th annual EdTech Conference titled “Reclaim Learning: A Domain of One’s Own.” This presentation examined a decade’s worth of experimentation and development at the University of Mary Washington that has resulted in a series of innovative projects such as UMW Blogs, ds106, and Domain of One’s Own. The presentation examined the common denominator of these edtech projects: they operate from a shared ethos of supporting an open environment for teaching and learning online by helping faculty and students alike exert control over the digital spaces they learn, teach, and live in.

On March 28 Groom was invited to keynote the Baruch College’s 17th Annual Teaching and Technology Conference. The presentation was titled “Domain in the Afterglow Or, What we Can Learn about Digital Identity from Geocities” and it explored the development of web publishing at universities during the mid-90s as well as the emergence of one of the earlier social media sites: Geocities. The presentation explores how higher ed turned away from the open web as platform at the turn of the millennium in exchange for coherence, security, and ease-of-use, the issue remains what was lost in that sacrifice. You can see the slide below and read more about the pesentation on Jim Groom’s blog here.

On April 10 Groom delivered the keynote presentation at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies Conference titled “Domains in the Afterglow” that was a further tightening of the talk delivered at Baruch College almost two weeks earlier.  The focal point being how can universities more broadly support an infrastructure beyond the learning management system that enables digital literacy and creates a student-centric technology ecosystem. Below is a video of the talk, and here is a trail of the Twitter conversation that resulted from this presentation. You can read more about this presentation on Jim Groom’s blog here.

More recently, on April 26 and 27 Jim Groom was invited down to Emory University, along with Tim Owens and Martha Burtis, to discuss Domain of One’s Own with representatives from various colleges in the Atlanta region at the Domain Incubator. This was a conference inspired by the work happening at UMW, and the two-day intensive program was dedicated to sharing the work UMW and Emory (who is running a pilot of Domains this year) have been doing over the last year. The keynote presentation Groom delivered was titled “Domain of One’s Own: a Problem of Coherence” and you can see the video below. The talk, which relies heavily on the ideas and words of Jon Udell, explores the deeper cultural implications of Domain of One’s Own by taking a broader view of the idea of coherent personal digital archives as something we will all need in the near future.