A Time Capsule of UMW’s DTLT in 2010

So, after tracking time on the blog today given Reclaim’s 5th birthday, Tim asked me to look for the DTLT Today video episode 105 where we announced Reclaim Hosting. I found it and Tim will be posting it shortly for posterity, but while I was searching for it in my hard drives I came across this strange video I barely remember making called “Jim’s Infomerical.” For some context, Martha Burtis asked me to basically outline my process of giving a UMW Blogs course presentation since she would be doing me an ace and visiting Allyson Poska’s class to provide an overview of the system.

According to the filename the video was from January 2010—which makes sense—and it’s crazy cause I believe you can hear every one of the OG DTLT instructional technologists I came up with at UMW: namely Martha, Jerry Slezak, Andy Rush, and Patrick Murray-John. Patrick was getting ready to head to GMU’s CHNM within a month’s time, Jerry would soon leave to run UMW’s Help Desk, and it would be a skeleton crew of Martha, Andy, and I until we picked up Tim “the Ripper” Owens.  At least I think that’s right—any help would be appreciated from those who were there with specific timelines, though, cause my memory is unreliable.

Anyway, the video is a kinda selfie recording of a much younger Jim Groom walking Martha through how I would do a class demo for UMW Blogs, but more than that it is a pretty accurate peek at the level of free flow banter and fun we had as a group for many a year. Sometimes I really miss hanging with those amazing folks in a drab office in duPont Hall having a ton of fun and talking all kinds of shit.