November 25, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Tim Owens, Jim Groom Presented at Emory University

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Jim Groom

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Tim Owens

On Tuesday, January 29th, Tim Owens and Jim Groom, in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, were invited to speak about Domain of One’s Own at Emory University’s inaugural “Symposium on Digital Publication, Undergraduate Research, and Writing.” The presentation covered the current pilot of UMW’s Domain of One’s Own while sharing the remarkable faculty development initiative happening around the pilot as well as the full blown implementation of this project come Fall 2013 wherein UMW gives all of its incoming freshman sponsored access to their own domain and web hosting.

Jim Groom Talks Tech with Chronicle of Higher Education and Wired.com

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Jim Groom, director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, is featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s first e-book “Rebooting the Academy: 12 Tech Innovators Who Are Transforming Campuses.” The Chronicle announced the book in its article “The Chronicle Releases Its First E-Book: ‘Rebooting the Academy’” on Wednesday, July 25.

Groom also is featured in the article “A Domain of One’s Own” on Wired.com.

Jim Groom Featured in Chronicle of Higher Education

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Jim Groom, director of teaching and learning technologies, is featured in the Thursday, March 29 blog post on The Chronicle of Higher Education website.

The post, “Professor Hopes to Support Free Course With Kickstarter, the ‘Crowd Funding’ Site,” discusses Groom’s efforts to raise $4,200 for a new server for ds106, the digital storytelling course.

Jim Groom Published in Debates in the Digital Humanities

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Debates in the Digital Humanities

Jim Groom, Director of Teaching and Learning Technologies, published a co-authored piece with Matt Gold in the recently publishing anthology Debates in the Digital Humanities titled “Looking for Whitman: A Grand Aggregated Experiment.” According to the University of Minnesota Press this volume

 

 

….brings together leading figures in the field to explore its theories, methods, and practices and to clarify its multiple possibilities and tensions. Together, the essays—which will be published later as an ongoing, open-access website—suggest that the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to contribute to the revival of the humanities and academic life.

 

Chronicle Names Jim Groom “Tech Innovator”

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has named Jim Groom, director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, one of 12 “tech innovators who are transforming campuses.” Along with the distinction, Groom is featured in the Sunday, Feb. 26 issue. The article “Self-Described ‘EduPunk’ Says Colleges Should Abandon Course-Management Systems” explores Groom’s involvement with UMW’s digital-storytelling course and his ideas on learning management systems.

UMW Cited as Model for Future of Networked Learning

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UMW, and UMW Blogs in particular, is being heralded in Richard Demillo’s new book Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities as a space of great educational ferment, to quote from George Leef’s review of the book here. In fact, Leef’s review not only examines more popular open education mainstays like MIT’s Open Courseware, but spends a bit of time discussing the role of networked culture in re-imagining the future of higher education:

Open courseware is not the only way online learning is going to change higher education. DeMillo observes that whereas the traditional college class involves the broadcasting of information from the professor to (doubtfully alert) students, blogs involve rich connection networks where students and instructors interact and share their questions and information.

In that regard, DeMillo points to a little-known school where there is great educational ferment: “At the University of Mary Washington, learning takes place in the digital spaces engineered by Jim Groom and his band of Edupunks. At UMW, learning takes place in blogs.”

And when highlighting the importance of a networked culture for the future of learning at institutions UMW is highlighted as a model. UMW Blogs provides more than open resources and lectures on the internet, it also enables the ability to interact and share ideas and resources that helps bridge the gap between institutions of higher learning and the web.

James Bacon, proprietor of the Bacon’s Rebellion blog that focuses on all things Virginia, not only gave UMW kudos in for its work with UMW Blogs in his post on the DeMillo book, but also points out what remains the most important lesson of UMW Blogs. The open publishing platform is not remarkable because it is single-handedly transforming higher education (such an assertion would be absurd), but rather it is how this platform embodies “the process of experimentation” that is still in its infancy when it comes to the future of higher education. To Mary Washington’s great credit, it has been on the bleeding edge of innovation in this regard for more than seven years.

Image credit:  Ethan Hein’s “Hyperbolic orthogonal dodecahedral honeycomb”

Jim Groom Featured in Times Higher Education

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Jim Groom, director of the Division for Teaching and Learning Technologies, is featured in the article “DIY, says ‘edupunk’ star. Distortion and sellout, say critics” in Times Higher Education. In the article, which appeared in the Thursday, Nov. 17 issue, Groom discusses the ideas behind the word “edupunk” and how they have evolved in the past few years.