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Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“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.
I am Jim Groom
Find out more about me here.
Recent comments
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Recent Posts
- Punk’s Not Dead
- Unscripted Futures
- Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- The Reclaim Student Showcase Returns for 2026
- Domain of One’s Own Version 2
- Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off to ILTA’s EdTech 26 We Go
- Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- Building a Blog You Can Walk Into
- Deferred Maintenance: Upgrading Mastodon and PeerTube
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Contributors
some favorites
- Alan Levine
- Andy Rush
- Audrey Watters
- bava.social
- Bonnie Stewart
- Brian Lamb
- Bryan Alexander
- Chris Lott
- Clint LaLonde
- Cole Camplese
- Darcy Norman
- David Kernohan
- David Wiley
- Gardner Campbell
- GNA Garcia
- Grant Potter
- Jeffrey Keefer
- Jon Beasley-Murray
- Jon Udell
- Kate Bowles
- Kin Lane
- Laura Blankenship
- Leslie Madsen-Brooks
- Lisa M Lane
- Martha Burtis
- Martin Hawksey
- Martin Weller
- Mike Caulfield
- Mikhail Gershovich
- Mountebank
- Paul Bond
- Scott Leslie
- Serena Epstein
- Shannon Hauser
- Stephen Downes
- The OLDaily
- Tim Owens
- Tom Woodward
- Tony Hirst
Category Archives: AI
A bava Dossier
Tom Woodward and I just finished a fun discussion celebrating 20 years of bavatuesdays (I’m milking this for all I can). I’ll post that video tomorrow as the 4,000th post because I think it’s appropriate. In preparation for the discussion … Continue reading
Shane Is Fight Club in Reverse
One of the things that emerged in our discussion of Shane (1953) in episode 44 of the Family Pictures Podcast is just how explicitly the film is rooted in real labor history, specifically the Johnson County War of the late … Continue reading
Thresholds of Violence in The Searchers (1956)
After re-watching The Searchers (1956) for episode 43 of the Family Pictures Podcast, I was struck by the way director John Ford constantly uses thresholds or portals to visualize the moral structure of the film. It isn’t so much about … Continue reading
AI Maddeness Playoff Picture
One of the funnest parts of AI Maddeness is tryng to create a sense of “hype” around each week. It’s not easy when you’re operating in an AI bubble, so as we come to the final weeks of the regular … Continue reading
AI Maddeness: How (Not) to Blog with AI
In the spirit of the talk at Reclaim Open, I fed the details of the video summary provided by YouTube’s AI into the game preview GPT I created for AI Maddeness. It wrote a post in the “spirit” of how … Continue reading
Family Pictures Podcast: Pauline at the Beach (1983)
For episode 20 — we’re obviously committed at this point, so subscribe already! — we take a long stroll through the shifting sands of Èric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach, a breezy yet piercingly sharp entry in his “Comedies and … Continue reading
Family Pictures Podcast: Taken (2008)
For episode 19 we went full throttle into Taken (2008), a hyper-efficient father-daughter revenge fantasy that launched Liam Neeson into late-career action-hero orbit.* You know the line. You probably heard it quoted before, or even quoted it yourself after watching … Continue reading
Family Pictures Podcast: Not Without My Orientalist Captivity Narrative (1991)
N.B: Ongoing experiments with AI-enhanced posts for my Family Pictures Podcast summaries. I think this will be one of the last. Although I do really get a kick out of how ChatGPT understands how I write, and what it fashions … Continue reading
Family Pictures Podcast: “Pretty Pretty?” – Female Trouble (1974)
N.B: The following post summary is predominantly written by ChatGPT 4.0. I couldn’t help but experiment with taking the extensive notes Michael Branson Smith and I wrote-up for this episode and feeding them into the machine. I asked it to … Continue reading
AI Maddeness: NFL Films Game Recap
Yesterday I started playing certain games from the last week of the 2000 season in Madden 2001. After spending hours figuring out the playoff picture, it was time to have a little fun. I played the Arizona Cardinals in hopes … Continue reading