About
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Reclaim Hosting, an independent web hosting company focused on the higher education community. Before founding Reclaim Hosting I was executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington (UMW). It was in this role that I experienced the potential of open educational technology first hand, and also the lack of institutionally-provided infrastructure for educators and students. This is what led to my move into the hosting industry and the founding of the company that provides precisely that. Thus I’ve been working for more than twenty five years in education and the edtech industry with a consistent focus on the design of networked spaces for teaching and learning in higher education.
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 much of the work I've been a part of in the field of educational technology over the last twenty years. While at UMW I started the web-based educational publishing platform UMW Blogs, an enterprise level academic publishing platform that hosted more than 10,000 campus-related sites. In 2008 the tempest in a teapot that was EDUPUNK was attributed to this post. But the really interesting work came in 2010 when I helped re-imagine the Computer Science 106 course on Digital Storytelling at UMW as an open, online community referred to as ds106— an experiment in teaching and learning on the web that has been celebrated internationally as a compelling community-based approach to online learning.
Additionally, in 2012 I helped spearhead an initiative at UMW called A Domain of One’s Own that provides faculty, students, and staff with their own domain and web hosting account. This project is premised on deepening the university's approach to digital literacy across the curriculum. The need for a solution like Domain of One's Own beyond UMW led to the creation of Reclaim Hosting in 2013. Over the past 12 years Reclaim has a built a reputation for world-class support for tens of thousands of faculty, students, and staff that depend on its services. Although my day-to-day role at Reclaim is focused on strategy and leadership, I continue to work directly with universities like Princeton, Stanford, and Virginia Tech to advise on how to best empower educators on the open web.
For a clearer picture of my philosophy and approach to teaching and learning technologies take a look at a selection of talks I've given over the years. Beyond that, I write regularly about my work as an edtech–in addition to several other interests of mine such as film, literature, retrogaming, and media of all kinds–on my home away from home: bavatuesdays.