Among other things, Jim Groom is Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, USA. I say among other things, because Groom is known more readily for several activities that outshine his day job. He is nicknamed the 'Reverend' (oh the irony), and is a purveyor of American pop culture, experimental educational technology and out-of-left-field philosophy.

Groom's popular and anarchic blog Bavatuesdays is a regular port of call for all those seeking this kind of eclectic and irreverent mashup of concepts, thoughts and opinions. Groom is also responsible for coining the term 'EDUPUNK', a nod to the remixing and do-it-yourself culture that has emerged in recent years in education as a refection of the 1970s punk music scene. He has set up a number of alternative learning experiences, but most notably, his MOOC on digital storytelling, more commonly known as ds106, has had tremendous impact on what we now consider to be possible with global, networked learning.

Listening to Jim Groom speak is a lot of fun. His 'formal' introduction for the event went a little like this:

“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy. (Dave Kernohan). 

Not a good start. His keynote speech at EDEN 2015 started in an anarchic, Robin Williams style 'Good morning Barcelona!!' shout.

Groom made several key points around the process of 'uneducation' (a term he borrowed from Brian Lamb) where he talked about 'descent into the maelstrom' - an account of effects of modern networked communication on professional practice. He asked the question 'how do we build an architecture that allows us to aggregate content from across the web and coalesce it in a centralised hub for learners?' Spontaneous network connections, incorporating social media into physical spaces, the use of digital repositories such as Wikipedia, all seemed radical several years ago. Tracing the history of online open learning, Groom talked about MOOCs emerging in 2008, which were about syndication, open networks, and about self organising communities building new practice for the web. He spoke on EDUPUNK and the arrival of 'do-it-yourself' learning where technology brought power to the individual. Education is about the exchange of ideas, and is not about technology, it is about people, he declared.

EDUPUNK was not about dismantling the education system, he said, but about reorganising the space, and about vitalising learning. In 2010, during a class Groom taught at Mary Washington University, Groom began to think about the work on MOOCs and how it could be harnessed to support his students' learning. He created ds106 - digital storytelling where each student would have their own web presence, create their own space, interrogate the web and build their own digital footprint. It was EDUPUNK remixed, but without the inconvenient metaphor. The international community of learning took to this with relish, with creative processes such as Grant Potter's self organised internet radio space, conveniently named ds106 Radio. Over 500 people's blogs were aggregated onto the central ds106 website, and the creativity was supported further. It was an open creative space for everyone within the community.
He featured a bizarre YouTube video of himself as 'Dr Oblivion' introducing ds106.



Jim Groom eventually replaced Dr Oblivian (who went missing) and led the course himself, and this identity sway provoked some creativity from the students, who created spoof videos and posted them on the web, including one entitled ds107. However, all of this identity play wasn't just fun for fun sake. There is a serious underpinning philosophy, where students gain a personal space on the web which they can control, and which is the antithesis of the institutional VLE/LMS. This, said Groom, is the essence of digital literacy. Students were given an innovation tool kit within their own domain, so that when they leave the university, they take it with them to us as they will.

Groom's concern is that users of the web reclaim their content and identity, where they can take back control of their domain, publishing online and syndicating everywhere. It becomes a new virtual infrastructure for learning, communicating and creating. It returns to the EDUPUNK ethos where instead of resisting the chaos, we engage with it, opening up a pedagogy of uncertainty, in a do-it-yourself style education.

Cue applause.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Good morning Barcelona!! Jim Groom #EDEN15 by Steve Wheeler was written in Barcelona, Spain and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.