This Is 47

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes

So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year. This is year #10. You can check out previous years below:

• 38
• 39
• 40
• 41
• 42
• 43
• 44
• 45
• 46

As always, the details:

Home: Cranston, RI
Relationship status: Married (12+ years)
Cats Owned: 3 (Bear, Imani, & Buster)
Other Pets: 0
Degrees earned: 6 (1 PhD, 3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate)
Reading since September 13, 2025: 265 (Latest reads can always be found on Goodreads)
Work:

• Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University (full-time)
• Consultant Facilitator, Speaker

Weight: XXX pounds
Longest Distance Run This Year: 12 miles
Fastest Pace This Year: 9:13 minutes (for 3.36 miles)
Runs in the last year: 219
Miles run in the last year: 1085 miles
Miles on the bicycle in the last year: 332 miles
Blog Posts on Blogger in the last year: 21
Blog Posts on my Substack: 56
Blog Pageviews: 1,252,000 (est between this blog and the Substack)
Blog Subscribers: 171 here; 20,040 on the Substack
Facebook Friends: 843
LinkedIn Connections: 3259
Twitter Followers: 1172
BlueSky Followers: 1849
YouTube Channel Subscribers: 5876
Website Domains owned: 9

Favorite Blog Posts of the Year

I have not been as consistent with posting on the By Any Other Nerd blog in the past year and went months (almost 6) without a new post  I'm back in a regular habit of posting a weekly book review. That said, The Tapestry and the Hustle (an updated essay on sense-making and life-work) stands out as the favorite post.

And, of course, I definitely have some posts on the Substack that I would highlight:

1. The Sleep of Liberal Arts Produces AI
2. The Awakening of Liberal Arts Produces AI Movement
3. From Awakening to Building: Liberal Arts “Next Moves” for Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI

These were three talks from October to July that were focused on the Liberal Arts and for me, was an interesting challenge to bring thread a conversation I had been thinking about over the last few years. I also found it a compelling challenge to keep growing and evolving my thoughts across these three talks in a way that acknowledged what had been said and still needed to be said to audiences who might not have heard or read the previous ones.

1. Agents, Agency, and Action...
2. The Audacious Ask of Higher Education
3. Apathies and Artifices in Education

These three essays were created as a way of both expressing my concern and at times, frustration, with where things are in higher education with AI, a genuine desire to (kindly) provoke people in higher education to really think through this moment, and a collection of emerging insights from the last year about what's next.

Looking Back

While the larger world has felt increasingly unstable, harmful, and difficult to make sense of over the past year, year 46 for me was filled with a great deal of joy, connection, possibility, and reflection. There are so many things happening in the world that I find horrifying and frustrating, particularly in seeing the actions of the current administration and the fact that so many people see those actions as good. At the same time, there are real, beautiful, funny, loving, and meaningful things happening in my own life.

I do not know that I have resolved that tension. I suspect I am not supposed to. But I have been thinking a lot about how to hold both things: the bad things happening in this particular timeline and the fact that there are still people I love, work I find meaningful, gardens that grow, cats that want attention, friends with whom I can laugh for hours, and new possibilities that I did not see even a year ago.

This was also the year that a lot of my life’s work came into clearer focus. It is not that I had not been thinking about it before. In some ways, these annual reflections are one long effort to understand the work I am doing, the life I am building, and the person I am trying to become. But this year felt different.

I have worked from the premise that my work should be influential or useful. This year, I saw more clearly that it may have more staying power than a blog post, a post, a talk, or even an individual project. There is a totality to the work I do and to the ways I try to show up in the world. It is still changing and evolving, and it seems to be doing something bigger.

Some of that came into focus because of receiving the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award. I am still somewhat in awe of that recognition and will get to receive it later this month at the EDUCAUSE conference in Denver. But the award is not the whole story. It is more of a signal of something I had already started to see: the compound interest of caring and working with people while putting things into the world that I hope others will benefit from.

There are things I have been doing for twenty years, fifteen years, ten years, and five years that suddenly feel more connected. There are practices, relationships, ideas, habits, and choices that seemed separate at the time but now feel like they have been building toward something. What I have to offer is uniquely derived from me, but it is also deeply interwoven with the people, communities, institutions, and ideas with which I have engaged over my personal and professional life. To learn more about my thinking on this, you can check out The Tapestry and the Hustle.

So, yeah. A lot has happened this year. Some of it has been professional recognition and growth. Some of it has been creativity emerging in new ways. Some of it has been community, gardening, cats, wrestling, and the ordinary things that make a life feel like a life. Let’s get into it.

Professional Changes

Professionally, this year felt different from the banner-year energy of last year (defending dissertation, starting at Northeastern, Mark Berman Community Outreach award). I continued to deliver talks and workshops, locally, nationally, and even a few internationally (virtually, mind you). I still love this part of the work to visit, meet, and engage with different campuses, audiences, and populations. This year, I had a bit more travel with this and appreciated the different campuses, their layout, their aesthetics, their classrooms, and such.

I have also been more intentional about doing some of that work collaboratively. I got to present with my dear friend, Rhoan Garnett and not only co-present but also write with Klaudja Caushi. I co-authored with Larry Davis as well as Carol Damm and Adam Nemerfoff and Xiaorui Sun. There's also about five other collaborations that are in the process of submission and waiting. I've really leaned into collaborations because they change the experience. They create a space to learn from other people, see different ways of framing an idea, and make something together that none of us would have made alone.

All of my publications this year were co-authored, and I am really proud of that. I like my own writing, obviously (says the person who keeps writing blog posts and Substack posts and is working on two books), but there is something different about writing with people. It means conversation, revision, learning through another person’s thinking, and trying to build something is stronger because it is shared.

More broadly, I am increasingly understanding relationships, mentorship, collaboration, and sharing as a central part of the actual work.They are not just things that happen beside the work. Some of the moments when I felt most aligned this year were at conferences, on Zoom calls, walking with friends and colleagues, or just having a conversation where there was laughter, reflection, and a sense of how fortunate we are to get to do this work. Being in relation and community has long been something I value, but this year it felt more clearly like an organizing principle. 

That is also part of why the leadership award feels meaningful. I do not sit in a conventional executive leadership role, but I do think I have been doing leadership work for a long time: connecting people, helping people make sense of complicated things, mentoring, facilitating, sharing, and showing alternative paths or adjacent possibilities. If that work helps other people see that leadership can look different, then that feels especially good.

I have also gotten more settled in my role at Northeastern. The first year was less about struggling and more about trying to understand what parts of me showed up there, how they could show up, and what the language and rhythms of the team and institution were. I understand that better now (I think). I have found ways to contribute that make sense for me, and I continue to appreciate being on a thoughtful, collaborative team where learning is happening all the time. Equally meaningful is that I have thoughtful colleagues who are kind, helpfully challenge my thoughts, and make me work differently (to the betterment of all).  They each have deep wells of knowledge and skills that I inevitably learn in every meeting and project I am with them.

The consulting work Chris and I are doing has also continued to grow. The combination of my background in teaching, instructional design, faculty development, and higher education, alongside Chris’s experience with mindfulness, operations and change management, has created some new and interesting opportunities. We were able to take on a few larger projects with some others on the horizon.

Working with your spouse is something a good deal of folks are surprised and intrigued by--often wanting to know more. Is there a learning curve?  Absolutely. Does it require each to be more thoughtful about what stays with the work and what we bring into other time together? For sure. Does it create a need to find the balance between work and play? Obviously.  Does it create fantastic opportunities for growth and learning to see your partner's abilities and skills in new light, thereby making it more rewarding to see your partner anew?  Helllllllls yes!

I am also still very much still doing a lot of learning. I do not think I am ever fully cooked, if you will. I hope that is part of what I bring to the work: a willingness to keep learning, to keep asking questions, and to keep revising my own understanding. This next year, a lot of that learning will involve agentic AI and trying to understand, with other people, how it fits into the higher education puzzle.

Home life

Home life was full this year: some grief, some growth, some really great gardening, and one delightfully ridiculous new hobby.

The Little Library has a life of its own. It is regularly visited, and it currently has more books donated by people who have stopped by than books that we have added ourselves. I love that. It has become something beyond an object in front of our house. There is something really satisfying about seeing books circulate, catching folks--a true cavalcade of different people--exploring, knowing that someone took something, left something, or simply stopped for a moment to look.

The garden was much more successful this year, too. After last year’s groundhog-led decimation of much of the garden, we built raised beds and added chicken wire. It worked! We had cucumbers again for the first time in a couple of years, as well as tomatoes, eggplants, beans, chard, kale, potatoes, and beets. It was a vibrant year in the garden. For a good part of July and August, I bought very few veggies from the market (and that's usually much of my purchase).

Gardening keeps challenging me in good ways. There is always a mixture of planning, chaos, weather, pests, surprise, failure, and eventually figuring something out. I am already looking ahead to what I can do differently next year. I want to get the garden basement organized, take stock of what worked, and build on this year’s success with a little more planning and clarity.

Chris and I also found ourselves deeply enjoying wrestling this year. We went to an event last December and somehow it became a regular part of our lives. We now go two or three times a month to Beyond Wrestling in Cranston, often with a small group of people, and it is just a blast.

There is something wonderful about the performance, the athleticism, the spectacle, the crowds, the chants, the signs, and the props. People are so deeply invested in loving the experience. It is silly and ridiculous in the best possible way, and it has become this regular, communal, fun thing that we did not know we needed.

We also welcomed two new cats into the household: Buster, a young kitten, and his mama, Imani. They have become part of our home, though Bear has some mixed feelings about the arrangement. She mostly tolerates them and is not always particularly excited about sharing her space.

This year also brought the loss of MJ, our mud turtle. I caught MJ when I was seven or eight years old. My father took care of him for around thirty years, and we took care of him for the last eight or nine. For a mud turtle that was supposed to live ten to fifteen years in captivity, he made it almost forty years. That is pretty remarkable. It was sad to lose a creature that had been connected to my childhood and to my father for so long. Yet, it did not hit me in the same way as losing Pumpkin, but it was still a named transition wherein there is one less thing in the world connecting to not only my childhood, but my father.

 
We have continued to think about what community looks like in Rhode Island and to build our own local network slowly. Some of that has happened through wrestling. Some of it has happened through neighbors, gardening, friends, and work. Some of it is simply the continued practice of making room for people and trying to build deeper connections close to home.

I still have more community-service hours to complete for the Master Gardener program. The class was useful, though it did not feel quite as substantial as I had hoped. That happens. I am hoping the volunteering piece will become another way to meet people locally and continue building relationships.

Travel this year was mostly work-related, but I am grateful to get out into the world and see new places. I got to go to San Diego twice, once for the POD Conference and once for consulting work, as well as New York, Virginia, Maine, and Long Island.

Health

Health remains a mixed bag in familiar ways. My weight has crept up more than I would like, and that continues to be a challenge. If you look across these annual posts, or really across my whole life, weight has always been something I have negotiated. I wish I were probably twenty pounds lighter, and I suspect that may always be somewhat true.

At the same time, I feel like I have a rhythm and routine that keeps me generally healthy. Daily exercise is deeply habituated. Running and cycling largely take care of themselves now because they are a meaningful part of my life.

I have also been introducing more weights and other kinds of movement now that my home office is set up for that. I want to keep paying attention to strength, mobility, and the things that help me stay capable over time.

Running was a little harder this year if I was looking to (pun intended) make strides rather than just sustaining I did not seem to find the same speed coming out of winter, and a tight hamstring over the last month and a half made it hard to build capacity. But I have still kept a pretty steady rhythm of longer runs in the eight- to ten-mile range on weekends and three to six miles most mornings during the week.

I feel comfortable in my body and grateful for what it can do. I am also more mindful about how I push it. Injuries can become a significant disruption to daily life, and I am less interested in proving what I can make my body endure than in protecting my ability to move, run, cycle, garden, and generally feel like myself.

The double marathon remains an idea I am still holding. I did not run 52.4 miles this year, and I am more realistic now about the amount of planning and energy it would require. I may get there in the next two or three years. I may not. I still like the idea, but I do not need to force it into being at the expense of the other important things in my life.

Finally, the journal that I have been using for over three years is almost finished. My general practice has been pretty sustained and simple to do. Each day I try to write what I accomplished, what I'm anxious about, and what am I appreciating. It's a simple format that allows me to capture the gist of the day. Now that the journal is coming to an end and I am wondering what does journaling look like next? 

Obviously, I can buy another journal and do the same thing, but I've played around with journaling in different ways over the years. There's an entire year where I wrote probably 200 or so words to capture my day. And I did that for a year. So in this moment, I'm in the mode of what could it look like? What might be different this time around?

Looking ahead

With the PhD done, I have more room to think about what I want to create and where I want to put my attention.

The memoir is still very much in early progress. I have had important conversations and some breakthroughs about what it should be and what it should not be. I want to give it more deliberate time this year. There is something about the distance I now have from my youth that makes this feel like the right time to take it on.

At the same time, a novel (or series of interconnected stories) has come into clearer focus. It is an exploration of AI that feels connected to my work but also very different from most of the writing, talks, and workshops I do. The memoir and novel feel like two sides of the same coin. Both are works of storytelling. Both need patience and attention. Both may move slowly, and I think that is okay.

I am looking forward to continuing the leadership and consulting work Chris and I are doing. I think there are new spaces opening up for that work, and I am interested in seeing where it can go.

I am also hoping to get more actively back into classrooms. It has been about a year since I have been in one, and teaching continues to be one of the places where I learn the most. I want to keep studying agentic AI, keep thinking about how it changes or does not change higher education, and keep having those conversations with people who are trying to figure it out too.

Mostly, I want this next year to involve continual growth: more creativity, more learning, more connection, more community, more garden hijinks, more laughter, and more opportunities to be useful...and probably more wrestling (attending; not participating--ha!)

That feels like a good direction for 47.

See you next year!

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