James Groom

I am an Instructional Technology Specialist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I have been working for over a decade 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 four 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 many of the innovative work I have been a part of in the field of instructional technology over the last two years.

Recent projects include working with Claudia Emerson, professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, on a “technology lab” in which four groups of students built their own online literary journals; working with faculty at UMW to implement UMW Blogs, a multi-user blogging environment (powered by WordPress Multi-User, an open source semantic publishing platform) designed to provide a web-authoring solution to faculty and students that is flexible and open; and designing a web-based database for collecting and sharing files among 12 investigators for the NEH Slave Housing project (we used the open source content management system Drupal to allow investigators involved in this project to add content, upload files, and share their images of respective sites).