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is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
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
- Eamon Costello on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Reverend on Punk’s Not Dead
- Reverend on Punk’s Not Dead
- Martin Weller on Punk’s Not Dead
- Maren Deepwell on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on Punk’s Not Dead
- Scott Leslie on Punk’s Not Dead
- Alan Levine on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- Jim Groom on Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- Jim Groom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Jim Groom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Tom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Zach Davis on Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
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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
browse the bavarchive
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: wpmu
Approximating the Syndication Bus with WordPress.com
Michael Willits (do you have a blog I can link to yet, and why aren’t you blogging this?) sent me an email last week about some of the very cool work Danielle Stern is doing with her Gender Communication courses … Continue reading
Building the Syndication Bus: Plugin Ingredients
While at Duke, UVA, and more recently the University de Mayaguez—I’ll post about that event as soon as I finish traveling—the most common question people had for me was how can they design/build the “Syndication Bus” for WPMu. Well, this … Continue reading
UMW Blogs’ Support Stats
When people ask me how much time I spend supporting UMW Blogs, I say it’s about an hour of my week, which is true. Now, to be clear, I think of support along the lines of “I lost by password” … Continue reading
Articulating the bus
Here one of my many attempts to articulate what I think is the heart of the experimentation we are doing, namely UMW Blogs as a syndication bus. I have a feeling I’ll be making a number attempts over the next … Continue reading
One blog…or many? A Closer Look at “American Technology and Culture”
Jeff McClurken and I have been working on a project for his History of American Technology and Culture course that I am pretty excited about. I’m digging this one in particular because it highlights some of the unique possibilities of … Continue reading
Lafayette College Piloting WPMu
This tweet from Bryan Alexander,who has been generously tracking the discussions and presentations at the NITLE Instructional Technology Leaders conference, alerted me to an impressive pilot of WordPress Multi-User at Lafayetter College. It’s a fine looking educational publishing paltform, and … Continue reading
Mozilla Open Education course
(Jan) Philipp Schmidt of Peer 2 Peer University has organized an open course (along with Mozilla and ccLearn) focused on designing the “open educational platform of the future.” It’s a great idea for a course (especially a free one!), and … Continue reading
Blog…You keep saying that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means
Forgive me for the re-publishing, but I just wanted to bring my page from the ELI 2009 presentation into the bava in an ongoing effort to build my personal brand and leverage my innumerable distributed online efficiencies and sweat equity … Continue reading
Fredericksburg Academy Blogs
About three months ago Susan Carter Morgan sent me a message inquiring about the work we are doing with UMW Blogs. She’s an Instructional Technology Coordinator and English teacher locally at the Fredericksburg Academy, and was pretty interested in bringing … Continue reading

Achilles’ Heel of the Syndication Bus
In a recent post about the development towards a syndication bus using WordPress Multi-User, Steven Egan brought up an excellent issue that for me remains the Achilles’ Heel for this setup: how can we syndicate comments along with posts? Thing … Continue reading →