(A note at the outset – I started writing this post about Jim Groom, only to realize how important Martha Burtis’ voice is to the story of ds106. I elected to write about the two of them to ensure that her voice is not lost.)
I would like to share a brief overview Jim Groom and Martha Burtis’ work around Digital Storytelling 106 (ds106) with the University Mary Washington (UMW) in Fredricksburg, Virginia.
Ds106, originally written by Jennifer Pollack, was restructured and delivered in an experimental ‘Open’ way in 2011 by Jim Groom and Martha Burtis. Faculty at UMW had, the year before, received their own domains and had started writing blogs, experimenting with open community and network building. Groom had been teaching ds106 face-to-face and suggested opening it up to the World Wide Web, allowing open participation. Burtis agreed, and the phenomenon of ds106 was born.
They taught different sections of the course – the first of its kind. It combined a real, practical understanding of ‘Open’ as an education concept and successful implementation. Ds106 is remarkable for several reasons: students received their own domain with which to demonstrate learning (something that later evolved into Domain of Ones Own, or DoOO), all the domains were syndicated into the main site so that they could be viewed by categories and tags, creating a connected, online community of students. Students were given the opportunity to submit assignments for themselves and other students to do, allowing them to choose an assignment a week from this democratized assignment bank to complete and post for others to view, give feedback and comment on.
This short introduction does not capture the seismic effect that this course delivery model had on Ed Tech in general. The after shocks of ds106 are seen in our own program, with each member of our cohort having a blog to publish to and network with, our syndication through Feedly, and the use of the RRU WordPress site to house the bulk of our teaching materials. Our blogs are open to the Web, meaning that anyone can view and comment on our work.
Martha Burtis is currently Learning Teaching Developer at Plymouth State University. She has blogged for many years at The Fish Wrapper, and currently muses about Ed Tech, teaching and more at Beyond the Wrapper.
Jim Groom is currently an owner operator of the web hosting company Reclaim Hosting, founded in 2013 that specializes in hosting for Higher ed. He continues to blog about Ed Tech, Edupunk topics, media, and his personal life over at Bava Tuesdays.
Resources:
Groom, J. (n.d.). About – Reclaim Hosting. Retrieved September 20, 2019, from Reclaim Hosting website: https://reclaimhosting.com/about/
Friend, C. (2016, August 19). Making and Breaking Domain of One’s Own: Rethinking the Web in Higher Ed. Retrieved September 20, 2019, from Hybrid Pedagogy website: https://hybridpedagogy.org/making-breaking-rethinking-web-higher-ed/
University Mary Washington. (2019). About ds106 [Course Description]. Retrieved September 20, 2019, from http://ds106.us/about/
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for the kind words about ds106, and you could not be more than right about the number of people it took to make ds106 work. Collaborating with Martha on this class in 2011 may still be the highlight of my whole career, the energy was palpable, and I think that was in part due to the fact an entire community in edtech (and beyond) took some of heir time and energy and focused it on 60 students at UMW. It was pure magic, and really highlighted he idea of a distributed learning network better than anything we could have said in class. The proof a was in the pudding, and the pudding was he network.
I’ll tell you my favorite story about Martha’s assignment bank, here we go….
I was skeptical at the beginning of the semester, we had come up with the idea as part of a call with Tom Woodward and Alan Levine (two more folks to add to the ds106 wall of shame) and Martha then proceeded to build it out in no time. It was everything we had dreamed of in many ways, a custom WordPress post type that allowed syndication of appropriately tagged posts, a thing of beauty and simplicity at once. But I wasn’t sure students would actually do it. And when one of the internauts from the Spring of 2011 added an early assignment called “Playlist Poetry” (http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/stories-written-in-windows-media-player/), I was like “That’s a stupid assignment. Really? Taking titles of songs from your iTunes and making poetry. Come on.” But within a day or so 30 people from all over the world had done the assignment, and Colleen (the student who submitted the assignment) came to class that Thursday triumphantly beaming with pride and I was like, “Jesus, this thing might actually work…” The rest is history, radio stations, tv networks, GIFs galore, but the glue holding it all together was not RSS, WordPress, or charisma, it was simply people having some fun.
Anyway, thanks for letting me be old and reminisce, and also thanks for featuring ds106, it is, as they say, #4life
Hi Jim,
I’m thrilled that you would stop in here and take the time to share your story. I had the opportunity to hear (and graphically record) your keynote at a BCCampus event a few years ago and the excitement about ds106 stuck with me in a big way. We were given the prompt of sharing someone we believe has contributed to ed tech and I wanted to share what you and that team did as it really has had a seismic effect. If I could draw a godzilla here to show the change it has made in the landscape, I would.
Cheers and deep gratitude,
Lisa