Reading Time: 9 minutes
The semester is over. All going well, my grading will be done by the time this post appears. I am looking forward to the student evaluations, which I made a very pointed pitch to have them complete. It is the second skills-oriented class I have taught and reinforced for me how much focusing on effort matters.
Continue Reading Æ is for Effort
Reading Time: 9 minutes
I was sick recently and had to miss some days of work. This meant that my email inbox was filling up. Even as we move into the holiday-end-of-semester-holiday period, I can see more than 50 emails a day. A handful of those messages matter—colleagues on a shared project, staff with specific questions that only I can
Continue Reading The Inbox and the Desk Chair
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I posted recently about how, despite there being a great opportunity, blogs seem to remain a niche information source. I mentioned the LawProfs network, which hosted a couple of blogs I followed (Academic Success, and so on), as coming to the end of its life. I had reached out to one of the blogs to
Continue Reading Blog Post Rescue Mission
Reading Time: 9 minutes
The University is moving from Anthology’s Blackboard learning management system to Instructure’s Canvas. It looks like it’s just in the nick of time. Our full cut over isn’t until fall 2026 but, both because I’m the person responsible for our instructional tech team and because I’m teaching in the spring, I figured I’d start to
Continue Reading Dog Fooding the LMS
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I had a sales pitch from a program inside Elsevier’s SSRN unit. The idea was to create a Research Paper Series that showcases the law school’s scholarship. The Dean pitched the cold call over to me and so I followed up. I was interested to see that part of the pitch relied on Cloudflare firewalling scrapers.
Continue Reading Scholarship Clout Chasing
Reading Time: 10 minutes
I had to laugh to myself when a journal editor said that it was all they could do to avoid an AI-only volume. We were on a panel discussing artificial intelligence in law school and I felt their pain. Who wants to read anything about AI any more? Haven’t we all had enough? At the same
Continue Reading Artificial Intelligence is a Gift
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve been at the law school for over a year now and we have monthly faculty assemblies outside of the summer months. It has been interesting to see people’s presentation styles in what is the largest regular meeting I attend. It’s an audience of 50 odd people—faculty and staff—and that’s a large audience. I recently had
Continue Reading High-Profile Presentation Logistics
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been noticing my guard dropping in my interactions at work. I first noticed it after a class, when the students had brought up a topic and I had ended up reaching back into my own personal history for a story. I’ve felt it a bit with interactions with some colleagues, when we have been
Continue Reading No, Your OTHER Self
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I will be taking my research and writing students on a tour of the law library soon. It’ll include a walk through our collection floors and past my office, as well as other nooks and crannies. I don’t keep any diplomas on the wall which, while I’m not defensive about it, I know is not the
Continue Reading Reflections on Paper
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve been in my current role just over a year and it is the second one where we had a bit of process change around money. In my previous role, the CFO died about 5 months after I started and we found that knowledge of some of the library’s processes died with him. When our finance
Continue Reading Wrangling the Money
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I’m in a liminal space on my writing. It was a very busy summer, one way and another, and I was in a bit of a forced march to get projects done before it was over. The book manuscript is the longest piece I’ve ever written. I got it and a journal article off to their
Continue Reading The Bump and the Grind
Reading Time: 5 minutes
It all started with a inflammatory headline on an article shared on Mastodon. It was from a politically aligned media site that was suggesting that a new Congressional Bill would deprive Americans of rights. I read the article and then I read the bill. By the time I returned to Mastodon, I saw three or four
Continue Reading Law Through A Kaleidoscope
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I am back in the classroom this semester. As I put together my syllabus, I faced the artificial intelligence section. It is, for me, relatively inconsequential even though I am teaching a research and writing class. I point students towards Grammarly, which the university (not the law school) has a site license for and I suggest
Continue Reading Irresolute Literacy
Reading Time: 4 minutes
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The cratering of X seemed to foreshadow a resurgence of blogging. New platforms sprang up, walled gardens expanded, there was some fracturing but, all in all, not a lot of obvious growth. As someone who blogs but more importantly follows other people’s blogs, it
Continue Reading The Blog Horizon
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been contemplating my ability to juggle my responsibilities—leader, manager, parent, partner, pup valet—and was reminded, once again, that we need to give ourselves slack. No one and nothing operates at 100%, let alone the cliché commonly brought up of 110% now that we’re in American football season, on a regular basis. If you are
Continue Reading Give It Your 85%
Reading Time: 9 minutes
I have just passed my first anniversary at the new job. It seems to have come around faster than I expected although, considering everything else going on in the last 12 months, that may hardly be surprising. There have been a number of changes that I had to negotiate, not all anticipated.
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