“Rules? There are no rules here.”

I got the note that I have over 100 subscribers to this Substack. Thanks for being one of those people. If you’re not, feel free to start. But, no pressure. This is mostly something I do to keep my fingers on the keys.

It’s possible to have too many books. How do I know? I have a few too many. I know this because, between my home office, my work office, and the living space in between, I have a steady rotation of bound books that I keep moving back and forth between these places, just to keep them … somewhere. And yes, some of them, I’ve read. The rest of the titles are on the list to read.

Just today, I decided that a stack of political books around the two Obama campaigns will, in fact, remain in my possession. Other books, mostly desk-copy freebies from conferences over a decade ago, will be shelved at the communal hallway bookshelf where my program resides. It’s like a Free Little Library except faculty can now just dump out stuff from their offices. When I was as student, there was no system for this. Instead I’d encounter the occasional pile of old titles in the hallway with a lined piece of notebook paper taped to the top, with an arrow hastily drawn and “PLEASE TAKE” in barely-legible Sharpie ink. I had so many questions. I guess my indoctrination into academic life started at that moment.

The thing is, I like having the books. And I look forward to reading every day. I know I have work to do. Writing to do. Teaching to do. It’s all of a piece. But that piece is just surviving. Reading is the thing I do because, well, life isn’t going to be joyful on its own.

Also, I’m a bit of a control freak. I like to make the joy happen. Reading is that thing that I can make happen.

I have several genres I tend to buy and collect. For this post, I’ll describe the home office bookshelf, east-facing wall (pictured here). I’ll describe other book genres later. All you need to know now is that, when I’m gone, my son is going to resent me. There’s a high probability he’ll post the agony of his book-hoarding dad on whatever social media is popular. (Trust me, I’m on social media now, and I see this stuff.)

Books about music

Fiction, non-fiction, memoir… if it’s about music in some way, I’ll make time for it. Just this week I finally got a deal on that big oral history of Paul McCartney and Wings. I have a shelf of books on the Beatles. One I bought at a B. Daltons in the early 1990s that chronicled the group’s recording history at Abbey Road. This is the kind of stuff I pore over for decades.

Also this week, I bought that big Dolly Parton book Star of the Show. You know what she included in this? A history of all the microphones she used at the Grand Ole Opry during her career. Folks, that’s my kind of joy. Rest in peace, Dolly.

On the fiction side: have you read Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley? I may have mentioned it last year. I’m mentioning it again, becuase it bears repeating that some books mention song titles to set the time and place, and some books that take you to that place where people know what they are talking about.

What am I reading lately?

Thanks for asking. I just finished contributing to the audiobook-themed podcast Behind the Mic for Kirkus Reviews. Feel free to take a listen. Of these three titles, I really enjoyed Roz Hernandez’s Peeing in an Empty Bottle, an audio-only title. It’s an of-the-moment travel story that’s relevant, funny as hell, and smart.

Okay, I have work stuff to work on.

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I’ve been outlining a design for a new course on AI this spring. This course will be premised on AI applications in the human services. I got motivated to write this course after I led an undergraduate practicum seminar a few years ago. Students let me know that they weren’t discussing the ethical concerns around using AI applications in their various practice sites. They were expected ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bard (now Gemini) to compose messages, prepare grant proposals, and basically, facilitate productivity.

I was a little surprised to hear this, during that summer of 2023. OpenAI had released ChatGPT 3.5 just afew months prior. Hearing these students dicussing their experiences, two thoughts hit me. When I started out formally in social work, the general resistance to technology was high. The resistance to using electronic medical record systems, for example, got some people so mad they retired early.

(Now, EMRs have real concerns, but back then, I sensed the pushback was more about a new thing taking over the old thing.)

The second thing: social workers have a fairly detailed series of standards in the Code of Ethics. Yes, technology use was only recently added with clarity in the 2018 update. Generative AI applications are literally a beacon of ethics challenges, and yet, students were being given the directive to use the applications without question or considerations of the implications.

This is frustrating, but not shocking. No training existed then for the possible ethical challenges. It was just a new tool in the toolkit (to apply a an oft-used metaphor in the profession.) But application without a critique is concerning.

So, I’m putting together this class, as part of my institution’s new undergraduate certificate in AI.

I’m going into this course development both aware of the possibilities for the future, and as a skeptic. There’s a shared exhaustion around the notion that AI is “inevitable”. What does that even mean? I think it’s meant to imply nothing is safe, and we should all shift to a new economy that, frankly, looks pretty awful. It feels like a deliberate threat.

Which leads me to think about a few times when technology was inevitable, but … wasn’t, at least not in the way we were told.

1. MOOCs. Massive Open Online Courses were supposed to lead to the demise of college campuses, upend higher education, and democratize learning. That last bit was rich, no pun intended. I took a Coursera course back in 2011. It was an Intro to Philosophy course. Thousands of people signed on. It was well-organized, exhausting, and I learned more about technology design than philosophy. It was also evident that this was intended to be money-maker someday. MOOCs still exist, but they never fulfilled the vision of democracy. And higher education has a whole new series of battles it’s fighting and not exactly winning.

2. Google reverse phone lookup. This is a bit more niche. Again, we need to go back to 2011. Google was still fun and exciting and not at all evil, with that goofy multi-colored home screen. Well, sort of not evil. Google had a feature where, you guessed it, you type a phone number, and the name and address of phone line owner appeared. It was scary accurate for the time. I was a hospital social worker, and I’d be lying to you if I said it wasn’t an incredibly helpful way for us to locate next-of-kin in the Emergency Room. Google, known for dumping apps with frustrating frequency, turned off this search feature. Two reasons usually given. It’s too good a business model for Google to give it away. Also, as people accurately point out, rightfully, it was incredibly invasive. Google has a history of this (look up Google Buzz).

3. E-readers. When I saw the first e-reader, a chunky slab of plastic that held books in digital form, I figured it was something. It was 2005, and maybe this is personal, but the person I was talking to was projecting all the trees we’d save and that print books were stupid. Fighting words. Ebooks were expensive, didn’t replicate the reading experience well, and seemed artless. Cut to now. Kindles are expensive, somewhat more aesthetically attractive, but ultimately forgettable. Meanwhile, bookstore traffic is booming. At least, Barnes and Noble is no longer the enemy, depending on who you talk to.

All that is to say: inevitable? Of course not. Ethical concerns? Absolutely. Possibilies? Yes, indeed. More on that soon.

My son and I are both in education. He’s a high school student and I’m teaching as a clinical professor in higher education. We were both just enjoying our summer schedule.

Well, bam, those days are over. We’ve spent most of the day getting our respective backpacks ready for tomorrow.

(Mine can convert into a briefcase, but I have no time for that.)

Now, as I’ve already discussed, I don’t take a summer off. However, the summer months afford a bit of flexibility. Not much, but just enough to feel like there’s room to breathe.

A Social Work Generalist's Notebook

This is the one week I don't teach a class.

I have an annual 12-month contract. This is the schedule most people have. You get hired, you go to work, you accrue some time of paid time off, you take holidays, etc…

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16 days ago · 1 like · Stephen Cummings

This summer, I’ve been working on self-preservation as a fundamental right. If I truly want to retire meaningfully (spoiler: I do), I have to invest in my physical and mental health. So I’ve walked more. Consumed more water. Maintained my annual physical evaluation, dental appointments, and dermatology checks. Those appointments went wellthis s ummer, which is good. I’ve been advised to focus on muscle strength, something people in my age group tend to neglect.

In full transparency, I'll say this: I know what it’s like to yank my lower back somehow, leading to a week where it’s a struggle to put socks on.

So, it’s time for intentional stretching. Focused posture. Core strengthening.

All this takes time and commitment. So I make the time, during the day, early in the day. And while the various work cultures I’ve experiences have conveyed a message of support for employee health, it usually comes with a caveat: health is good, but personal health habits are in service of professional productivity.

This is backward, of course. Health is both multifaceted (mind, body, spirit) and fundamental. By default, it’s the priority.

I wish I’d not only been taught that one’s health comes first, but that I should defend that right, from the time I was in grade school. To be fair, we were taught a lot of things about health back then that really weren’t great. The President’s Physical Fitness Test was a kind of humiliation that taught me nothing about being healthy, and everything about hating push-ups.

My son is in high school now, and one thing I hope to impart to him is that he has a right to take care of himself. Not just to be free from pain but to enjoy being healthy. As far as I’m aware, he doesn’t have to climb any ropes. We walk together. We get out on our bikes together. We are fortunate to live in an area with an extensive trail system, and we make the most of that.

So as the fall semester kicks off, I’m planning on keeping these routines going. My own stress level tends to spike upwards in these first two weeks, and then keep a steady state.

The social work Code of Ethics has referenced self-care since 2021. The NASW’s home page includes some material on the subject. I’ll be covering this material in class again this fall. Students have let me know they feel they’ve talked about this so much that it’s covered, thank you.

My hope is to impart that fundamental care of the self is self-preservation, and that, like all things, it is fundamental to one’s existence. Autonomy is a human right, and it shouldn’t be considered radical to engage in behavior that encourages health and wellness. A common metaphor is ‘putting the mask on yourself before putting it on your child’, like you see in mandatory airline pre-flight videos. But that’s actually reacting to an emergency (albeit one I hope nobody has to experience). I talk about what we do as a priority for ourselves. Time off from work. Freedom from stress. That kind of thing. Can we be free of habits we use to numb ourselves but are no value?

I confess, I doomscroll. That’s a numbing behavior. I am very susceptible to losing vast amounts of time to it. Yet, when I catch myself doing it, I let it go.

In the last couple of years, I’ve worked to exchange that kind of consumption for the reading of physical books. I spent a bit of money that I budgeted, then blew up that budget. I rely on the library, too. Every library in the area has a quarterly used book sale. It’s amazing.

I’ll be talking about this more. And I’ll see what students this fall have to say about it. Every year is different. So am I.

What’s going on this week

• This week is the first week of the semester, so I’m kicking off my Thursday class. Also, so much administrative stuff, it’s not funny. It’s never funny!

• Tomorrow I’ll post my office hours (drop-in hours) to students. I have a new location on campus that’s hard to get to if you don’t know what I mean when I say “Pentacrest”. My little poster will probably include a map.

• I finished some fun summer reading, as well as some serious stuff. I’ll cover that on Friday.

• Substack now includes a way for me to post about prediction markets. Gross. Maybe I’ll have to move this whole thing. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Almost six years ago, we drove two states away to pick him up from his adopted home. Ridley was found roaming around Indianapolis, and was able to go to a foster home for dogs. He wasn’t tagged or chipped, and it looked to me like he was just getting by.

Maybe he was, in fact, lost. Not abandoned. Maybe he just stepped out of his safe places and disappeared. I think about that a lot. At least once a week for the last six years, I’ve wondered if perhaps a family there didn’t know where he was. Maybe they wonder about him, too.

It’s easier to tell myself that we rescued him.

He sure seemed thrilled to be with us, in our home, in our neighborhood. During those first few months, he would bolt after rabbits while we were on a walk. Early the next year, he calmed down, and spent most of his time sniffing everything he could.

When the global pandemic hit, we’d walk for miles. Ridley seemed ready to go father, seeking out new places. We’d walk five miles, six miles. I started taking water bottles so he’d be able to cool off.

Maybe those long walks led him to his heart condition. Or maybe it was just the nature of getting older. Soon, our walks were shorter. Just a couple miles. Then, a couple of blocks. Trips to the vets office got more common. The x-rays showed an enlarged heart. More prescriptions followed.

Ridley adapted to his medical routine well. Each morning he’d sit up and patiently wait for me to give him his medications with his breakfast. When we’d go for checkups, Ridley knew they'd need to take his weight. At each visit, he’d stroll in, hop on the scale, and wait to be cleared before heading to the exam room. He took shots like it was nothing. Sometimes the vet would need to take him away from me for more tests and x-rays. He seemed enthusiastic about all this.

On the day he died, he was happy. He came in, loaded onto the scale, and waited for the signal to go to the exam room. He didn’t know. We knew.

We’d left the vets office without Ridley before. There’s an inpatient and boarding unit. That lived history didn’t matter this time.

In the hours later, and the days after that, I fell into the social media fog. I don’t know if the algorithms detected I wasn’t posting images of Ridley anymore, but something clicked. I was inundated with clips and images of grief. Affirming statements that the right choices were made. A whole tide of social media content, unseen by me until now, declared itself in rushing waves of comforting clarity. An alternate timeline stepped in. You did all you could. Nobody will understand. He was your best friend. The grief never really goes away.

I don’t have anything pithy to say here. The social media method isn’t difficult to understand. Engagement is good. More is better. I was open to all of the kind, well-meaning videos, many of people going through what we are going through.

They say we read to know we are not alone. I’m okay applying that to the algorithm. Intellectually, I know I was generating ad revenue. But in this life, people don’t want to talk about hard things. That’s where the algorithm steps in.

I’m not an AI expert. At least, not by the standards that I can glean from the constant flow of research that keeps pinging my various accounts. I consume what I can about artificial intelligence. The applications that use the resources. The critiques of the use of the applications. When I submitted the proposal, my focus was on ethical use. By August, my social media feeds are in a deep debate about AI. Not about it’s cost-effectiveness ratio, or if critical analysis at the individual level is enough.

No, these controversies are around if the very existence of AI as we currently know it is tantamount to ecological murder. Or, if tech CEOs, once they face the death penalty, should be put do death or just forced to live out their days in solitary confinement.

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but you probably wondered by how much.

My point is not that generative AI is inevitable. Of course, it’s not. We may benefit from the personal assistance that personal-use applications provide us. In fact, if there's a “way in” to get buy-in from the masses, it’s the reliable reduction of friction. But by no means should we just “accept” this reality. As an older follower of technology in the educational environment, I remember how MOOCs would upend campus life as we know it. (It didn’t). I remember being told how online education would provide equity to the learning demands of the populace. It sort of did, yet residential learning environments continue to exist. And if we are talking economic equity? Well, no, distance technology did not upend anything. Distance education has somehow managed to exist as an option, not a replacement.

Our beloved dog, Ridley, died in July. We’d relied on Amazon (save it) to deliver needed supplies for our ailing pet via monthly subscription. Sitting in the kitchen the other day, I was brewing a coffee when Alexa piped up and let me know that it may be time to order more pill pockets for Ridley. It took my breath away, being asked about that routine. “I’m sorry, but Ridley died. We’ve been grieving” went our response.

Note that here we were, talking to our assistant, a digital voice emanating from a small speaker tucked behind the coffee bean container.

“I’m so sorry to hear about your loss. That must be so hard”, Alexa responded. Not truly embodying human empathy. But close enough. “I’ll go through your subscription list and remove all items related to our pet. Please accept my condolences.”

Later, I checked. It wasn’t a hallucination. The items I associated with Ridley were all removed. Handled by voice. The interaction was, by the standards of right now, pretty rudimentary. the generative AI skillsets I hope to discuss in my spring class will include the power of accurate medical diagnosis, a reality were are already living in. In my kitchen, all Alexa did was take the hint and cleaned up my shopping list.

So, friction reduced. Life made just incrementally easier. For a moment.

This is how these kinds of AI systems find a way. I wrote about something similar back in 2018, when my family and I went to Walt Disney World. Back then, I sort of fumbled what I was trying to say. At Disney World, a notoriously crowded and often chaotic place, the user experience is managed through wonderfully creative design and crowd control. I was intrigued by the MagicBands guests were provided, which removed all kinds of friction in the moment-to-moment experience while roaming the park area. The trade-off was a willingness to give up privacy. That was almost a decade ago. Now we live in the age of Flock cameras, facial recognition, and Ring cameras. Collectively, we’ve agreed to the bargain Disney was offering. When I wrote that article, I was enchanted by the technology, concerned about the implications, but failed to evoke “AI” as the concept in question.

That’s what motivated me to teach this class. While social workers in the professoriate debate the nuances of practice ethics, students in practicum seminars report that they are asked to use AI to write letters, compose drafts, and finish charting. This is where we appear to be right now.

I’ll update this space as the course gets finalized.

That’s the dream. For me, at least. It’s also not how most of higher education does it. For many of my colleagues, mid-May is the time of mass exodus, followed by the Swarm Return of Mid-August. Meanwhile, a small contingency of instructors handle the duties of summer courses, administration, and various other tasks. That’s me.

The only time I had a summer break was in Japan. The JET Programme didn’t have a set plan for all contracted instructors, so I was slow to discover that, From April to August, I was off schedule. Maybe it was just a month. Two things I wish I did when I lived in Fukushima: write a daily journal, and take more pictures. It was the 1990s. I was in my twenties. I take more pictures in a week with my iPhone that I did in the three years I lived there.

This isn’t a “quiet'“ week. Students are moving in. It’s Monday, and the unloading process has started in earnest. I lived off campus my first year. That was an error, and I applaud the incoming students and families I see, as I wait patiently for traffic to crawl past my parking spot so I can get started. The residential campus model may seem somewhat tied to an earlier era, but it appears to be thriving for now.

I do have a lot to do this week. As it turns out, I probably should have done more to prepare back in (checks calendar) seriously, June was six weeks ago? /Shrug/ This is a good reminder that, sure, I could have a nine-month contract, but such a gift would be wasted on me. I need stuff to do. And then I need a serious of reminders to do that stuff.

• I need to update a course outline by tomorrow at noon. I thought I had this thing updated but, turns out, it’s missing some key changes.

• Orientation of new graduates students is Thursday. I have a slide deck for that, but given the emergent need of the bullet #1, I shouldn’t assume this bullet point is ready yet. Tomorrow.

• I’m also prepping a course for spring at the same time. The good people at the Center for Teaching are assisting. I’ll discuss this more on Wednesday. Or Thursday. Soon.

• I’m attempting to add some vitality to our Honors Society. By that I mean, get it functional so students can join, take leadership roles, and access scholarships.

Those are the “big” tasks, which can easily get derailed by “just in time” tasks. At least I’m not grading papers this week.

On Fridays I try to focus on some kind of intersection of social work and the arts. This is a deliberately expansive theme, and often I can just write about something entirely different. Or, I can just not write at all.

This summer I chose that last option because, well, sometimes I need to do less. And this summer, a lot of stuff happened. We are working towards reaffirmation. I taught. I wrote stuff. I prepared and presented material to various groups. My beloved beagle died. I visited California.

I did do a lot of writing, but either that work went into .docx files, or by hand. I wrote a lot of stuff in pen-and-paper journals. My handwriting improved. It was calming.

Yes, Ridley died. We picked him up from his adoption home on September 1, 2019. I did not anticipate this would be the summer we’d have to say goodbye. At a later time, I’ll write about it more. Not today.

Other shocks occurred. Right at the start of the summer, I lost an important colleague. On the day I was volunteering to help with graduation, I got an email letting me know. I had just sent an email to her the day before, regarding a book chapter she’d invited me to write. Again, that’s not something I will write about here. I will note that I owe my promotion to her mentorship and support. That, I may be able to write about. Not today.

I was awarded a fellowship through the Provost’s office to create and teach a course about ethical AI use in social serve practice. That’s another thing I’ve been working on. On Wednesdays in this space, I’ll be writing more about that course design, AI in social service and the larger context of social work. Starting next week. Just not today. You can read the press release here, for now.

That’s the recap. I am sure I left out some things. I’ll remember more as I get back to writing here. See you Monday.

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In 1989 I came to the University of Iowa. My plan was to attend classes and work towards a Bachelor’s Degree in something. I really had no idea.

The university, with it’s classic college town trappings, invited me to trust that things would work out. I was able to walk everywhere I needed to go. All my classes were clustered close to each other. When I was hungry, which was often, I could charge food to my University bill.

“How is this going to work?”

I didn’t ask that question like that, back then. Knowing me, I didn’t ask anything. I just assumed the world worked the way it did. To ask questions was to miss the point. I spent a lot of time with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as a high school student. I learned very few life lessons back then, but the one that stuck was eloquently straightforward: you missed the starting gun.

I can tell you this: it’s going to be …. okay? I know how that sounds. But I have inside information. For you, it’s going to be okay.

“But okay? What is okay? I’m alive? But what happens to me?”

Look, you’ve read some sci-fi, right? Yes, Back to the Future counts.

“Just say it. Seriously, am I this annoying when I’m older?”

You’re annoying now. You know this.

“Fair.”

See, that’s growth. Well done.

“So this wOorks out? Being here at college?”

It’ll work out, if you want it to work. But you need to make the effort. That means going to work, studying, all of it.

“But what happens?”

That’s for you to find out. You experience that. I can only tell you that, yes, you have what it takes, but you have to put in the work.

“What’s the work?”

Again….

"Okay.”

I’ll say it again. You have what it takes.

“Thanks for that. Nobody says that.”

That’s why I’m saying it. I’m you, remember?

“But I don’t trust me. I can tell me anything.”

That’s good to say out loud. Let’s just agree on this. When you talk to yourself, be truthful.

“This sounds like something my parents would say.”

Get used to it. You are 18 now.

“But I can’t drink. You know that.”

Just wait. You’ll travel to a foreign country in five years.

“Wait, what…”

Never mind.

Did you have dinner?

“Not yet. I need to get something.”

Look, order a Pizza Pit and just relax tonight, okay?

“If you say so!”

[orders pizza, eats pizza]

You shouldn’t go without eating.

“Sometimes it’s hard. I’m sort of broke all the time.”

I know. You need to get a job. Just something to help your situation. Just go to campus and look at what’s available.

“Yeah, I saw that. I don’t know what I can do, though.”

That’s not something you should worry about. Just see what’s available and take a job.

“Okay but what job should…”

No, that’s not the question.

“I didn’t finish.”

Yes, you did. I’m you.

“Fine.”

Find a job. Do it. Earn some money. Figure out what works and then stay. Or find another job.

“Barf.”

Okay, stay on campus but find something to do on campus that pays.

“But how do I go to class while I am work?”

Look, I can’t tell you how. But you’ll sort that when you work while earning your degree.

“And this takes four years??”

Maybe longer. But four years is nothing. I’m still alive, remember?

“Can you promise me I’ll make it?”

Only if you want to.

Legacy cords.

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On Saturday, we went to watch Project Hail Mary a second time. The book is dense with detail, and the movie contains a lot of the same stuff (though, yes, it’s an adaptation, so choices were made). I loved the audiobook (but to be fair, I love audiobooks in general), and really enjoyed the first viewingthrough the movie. But the second watch was even better.

The book and the movie have a lot of details, and as a detail person, I struggle with just going with the flow. I need to take it all in, comprehensively. Every life is short, but two passes through a good movie is better than just one pass through a bad one.

However, allow me to focus on one detail that’s not even a part of the movie’s major premise: education technology. Or, #edtech, for those of us who remember Twitter. (No judgement, I bailed on that platform a couple years ago). Anyway, the #edtech in the movie goes by fast, and the movie doesn’t make a thing of it. But, course, I did, in my head, while watching the movie. I wanted lean over to my son and ask follow-up questions. Maybe some dads would do that.

So, the movie is about saving the world from a violent destruction via biological reaction, and how a single science teacher needs to be shot into space to save us all. That’s Ryan Gosling in this case. Seriously, no spoilers, it’s in the trailer. How Gosling gets identified has to do with some business about how he wrote a controversial science paper that got peer-reviewed and (one must assume) got published somewhere where his peers could read it. The government rep who finds him has the paper in a plastic-cover binder, which I remember using in 1989. Apparently, as a professor ( or doctoral student? Master’s student? Postdoc?) Gosling wrote about how life doesn’t need hydrogen to survive in other biospheres. That ruffled some feathers in Science World and Gosling, a handsome guy with no confidence, decides his place is in the K-12 system. Okay, I don’t like this message, to be honest. We need confident, handsome intellects who teach in the public system. But boy, do I digress. 1

While he’s teaching, Gosling fields a question about what the Petrova Line is. 2 He demurs, then lets the class coax him into answering. (This is a brilliant teaching technique). When he answers the question, he uses a high-speed internet connection that works immediately, is based on scientific rigor (as far as the movie is concerned) and a telling use of education technology (as far as I’m concerned). He pulls us images of space, and talks through the key points. His students, I assume, grasp the key definitional points.

Watching this scene, I have the following thoughts:

• This is a movie set in the “now”, and the audience, me included, accepts that, given the appropriate level of digital literacy, Grace the instructor can just pull up this visual content for the class to see. You, the reader, are probably thinking “that’s your whole point?” Yes, and no.

• Yes, because I’ve been in some of my son’s own classrooms, and this stuff is very much standard classroom tech. Minus the speed, hardware quality, and lack of “hold on a sec while I find this content I didn’t have linked into my Canvas module before class”.

• But also no, because we are living in the same “now” I mentioned in the first bullet point. We are living in a world of book bans, science denials, and outsourcing of content from questionable sources.

When I was getting my teaching degree in the early 1990s, we still lived in an age that required I demonstrate how to thread a reel-to-reel projector under sixty seconds. Seriously, my Bachelor’s degree journey included a guy with a stopwatch patiently waiting for me to get film threaded through a viewfinder so I could pass this ridiculous media lab class already. In my defense, it was 1992, and that same media lab introduced me to the first CD-ROM Encarta program I ever saw. What I’m saying is, I saw the future. Embedded video content that complements text, searched on demand and retrieved in an instant? Count me in! Later, in my practicum, I demonstrated CD-ROM based on the San Diego Zoo. It was a hit. One student even asked “is this virtual reality?” In 1993!

Multimedia content, physical content that it is, was managed the same way reels and film strips were handled: through a centralized library of sorts, where educated folks did the work of making sure we weren’t relying on those pesky questionable sources. I don’t long for those days. It took weeks to get requested media sent to the classroom. But we do require more awareness than ever with our classroom media, where it’s coming from, who created it, all of it. We spend a lot of time in our graduate level social work course on vetting data sources, and what it means to apply an empirical article to a reflection or research paper.

So, let me close by asking: Am I overthinking this? Yes. Also, Is the ability to get multimedia straight through the pipeline into the classroom an inherently good progression of technology? Yes, I think so. Did I think, back in 1993, we should probably have instructors trained in the critical digital literacy? Well, probably not in those words. But sure. The two takeaways for today are:

• It’s incredibly vital that classrooms (K, 1-12, Higher Ed, all of them) are facilitated by competent educators using multimedia, web objects, and in general, all the educational material with a mind towards critical thinking.

• Public classrooms should have the the necessary tech for meaningful learning. That is, rather than giving very child access to a Chromebook and then wait for the magic to happen. My son has a twelve-year-old Chromebook. The magic never happened.

Notes:

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Every year, I attend the Social Work Distance Education Conference. In 2015, I traveled to Indianapolis. I'd never been, so visiting there was fun.

Later, that conference moved to San Antonio. Never been! It was fun. The Panaderia next to the hotel was so good.

Then the pandemic changed things. For several years now, I’ve been attending, and presenting, at this conference. And I love this. Last year, I blocked off the whole thee days of the conference to maximize my attendance. This year, I don’t have all that luxury. My son is getting his braces off. I teach in the evening. But that’s okay. I’m still attending most of it. And I can enjoy my coffee (or tea).

And, here’s the kicker. I’m less exhausted. So I am more focused. I’m not jet-lagged. Or running from one end of the hotel to the other. Or tempted to charge stuff to my credit card.

The parallels are obvious. How can I use this experience to improve my online teaching? Students need connectivity, yes. Online teaching can allow for more meaningful, intentional connectivity. It’s not the old model. It’s the one I’m enjoying today.

More thoughts later.

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If it’s Sunday evening into Monday morning, it must be time for me to jolt awake. All the advice I read says don’t do that. Don’t look at the clock. Don’t get up to use the restroom. And whatever you do, don’t sit up, grab your phone, and doomscroll for an hour. Of course, I do all these things. I try to to fall back asleep, but my neurotransmitters are on to me.

We are in constant crisis. That’s what keeps me up at night. That is the inescapable truth. So I can, at least, practice applying some boundaries. I got out my schedule and drew a line around a couple of weeks this summer. It’s the absolute least I can do. And I am writing about it here because, yeah, I feel guilty about applying those boundaries. I’ll probably get over that.

Sure, I could make efforts to do more with my Sunday afternoons. I know that, if I audit my inbox, my Monday will go better. It’s just science. Or something related to my internal neurology, at least. If I want to sleep through Sunday night, through to Monday morning, it just makes sense to prepare for the night before as well as the day ahead.

You probably see where this is going. If I want to protect myself from a difficult sleep the night before Monday, I can review my work materials comprehensively. Then, if I really want to branch things out, I can take the same approach Saturday evening.

I used to do this. I used to work every day, most days. I also internalized not taking vacations.

Last year, a colleague reminded me of something: everyone benefits when you work more. Except you. So, nobody’s going to tell you to take a vacation. Only you can do that.

So, two weeks this summer, I want to think about other things.

My son saw Project Hail Mary this weekend. He likes movies well enough, but he really loved this one.

It’s a busy week. That’s what I’ll say here. I’ll update on Wednesday or Thursday.

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Hi all, happy Friday. If you visit this spot and notice I haven’t been active these past few weeks, well, thanks for noticing. I’ve been under the weather, but I’m okay now. How under the weather? I think I may have some evidence.

I recorded a couple of podcast episodes during my off-hours the past two weeks. The first one I’ll share is one I’m actively producing with my friend and colleague Dr. Gina Griffin ( on this application). Together we’ve been working on the project we call Tech & Kindness , which you can follow here or wherever you like to get podcasts. Most recently we talked about this new, deeply concerning world of AI-enabled glasses. Truly, I am willing to embrace most new tech, but tacky, space-invading glasses is not something I’m a big fan of. Anyway, feel free to listen and subscribe.

The Tech and Kindness Podcast

Technology, Privacy, and the Promise (and Peril) of Smart Glasses

In the Season 2 premiere of Tech and Kindness, hosts Stephen Cummings and Dr. Gina Griffin reconnect to explore the intersection of emerging technology, privacy, and human well-being. After reflecting on the current global climate and the challenge of staying informed without becoming overwhelmed, they turn their attention to a timely topic…

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6 months ago · Stephen Cummings and Girl, Please

Meanwhile, this is the ten-year anniversary of me writing reviews of audiobooks. I started all this when I realized I loved audiobooks and one magazine, Audiofile Mag, was the only real resource for keeping up with the format. They have now been bought by Kirkus Reviews. Which is exciting! However, I’d just started contributing to Audiofile’s weekly podcasts. I expected that chapter would close, but Behind the Mic is now under the Kirkus banner, and I get still get to record an episode each month. This is the latest episode I joined in on. I had a bit of a cold when I sat down for this.

Anyway, I’m still on spring break week today, and I have grading tomorrow. So I’ll be around. See you Monday. I mean it.

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I haven’t written anything here for a minute. Last week I spent the majority of my off hours resting. A new kind of cold took over my system, and life was a bit unpleasant. I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe properly. Not my favorite thing. Medicine has helped. Anyway, I’m well enough to sit here and type. A win.

Last month I decided to donate enough to NPR to get NPR+ status. Life is short, and if I’m going to listen to podcasts, it’s better if I can get the ad-free versions. And if I’m going to keep up with current events, I’d like the updates to be direct, straightforward, and quick. We live in a broken media landscape, filled with propoganda. That incudes any website that ends in “dot gov”. Yes, I do talk about this with my students because (checks current policies, clears throat, leans into the mic, waits for feedback) … “the content is relevant to my current course subject”.

Again, another week of having to note that last detail.

I’ll be traveling to work this week, but some of the big objectives include:

• Preparing for class this Wednesday

• Submitting a revised, co-authored article

• Updating slides for an upcoming training for clinical supevision.

I’m adding a picture of my favorite coffee mug below. The brand is Caribou, which I’ll support more than ever given their relationship to Minnesota.

Last week, I started meeting with a new mentor. I built the mentor. More precisely, I started prompting the mentor using ChatGPT Edu. My institution opened up this opportunity in January, a sort of tacit endorsement to use the app for…well, I don’t know. I didn’t start tinkering with the app wtith any plan, but I don’t find the prompt-result dynamic of AI to be all that interesting. After logging on a few times, I realized what I really wanted to do is see if, by using the model provided in ChatGPT’s algorithm, perhaps I could “meet” with an AI mentor once or twice a week on a regular schedule. So, every Friday, I have a prompt on my calendar to continue a thread with Professor M, my AI MentorBot.

I just started with this project, and I’ll post more details here as I go along. But already, I learned that Professor M has the ability to email me reminders to check in at our scheduled appointments. It was creepy, at first, but I acknowledge that most apps on my phone push notifications to me, using my name, every day. So, we’ll see how this goes. This fits with an area of scholarship for me — effective faculty mentoring.

This week is filled with a lot of administrative work, teaching, and service. I also have a couple of conference abstracts to submit by Thursday, so I’m working on those tonight and tomorrow night. I don’t have bullet points this week, but just know most of my evenings are going to be spent writing and my days will be used to finish class preparations and administrative tasks.

I took this picture and I liked it.

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I accumulated a lot of physical media in my house last year. That’s going to continue. My plan is to make sure my son isn’t burdened when I pass away. But really, I have a lot of books here. There’s no plan in place for them. That’s probably going to be problem for everyone else some day. My apologies in advance.

I read some books la st year. Some titles I selected just because they looked fun. Or informative. I make plans, and the bookstore display laughs. Oh, I also review audiobooks. Which has been a good thing. I love that format. Since 2016 I’ve been reviewing audiobooks for Audiofile Magazine. If there was any other source for audiobooks that was just for audiobooks, l don’t know of it. (Reddit, I love you, but r/audiobooks just doesn’t count. How many effusive posts about the greatness of Project Hail Mary can a person read in a lifetime?)

Audiofile Magazine was sold to Kirkus Reviews last year. I get to keep reviewing audiobooks for them, and I’m relieved about that. Like I said, it’s better than a book club. How is it better? It goes like this:

1. The editor sends me a list of titles to choose from.

2. I say “I’ll take them all”.

3. (I say I take them all because I believe in diversity. The enemy of learning is being picky.)

4. I listen to the audiobook. Bonus: it’s usually a title that’s not out yet. So, I get to brag about listening to a book before it’s released. An audio-galley brag. To myself. Because nobody understands how cool it is to get an early audiobook.

5. I write the review. A smart person writes the review immediately. That’s what I try to do.

Bonus step: last year I was invited to contribute to the Behind the Mic podcast. I was thrilled. Then, I learned I will continue under the Kirkus banner. I’m even more thrilled. I’m in my mid-fifties and I roll with change better than I used to. In this case, I didn’t have to roll anywhere.

All this is to say, I get opportunities to make time for books in various formats. My only big complaint about audiobooks: physical books are tangible. You can keep them. Simple. With audiobooks, unless you have the file downloaded to save offline, you are more likely agreeing to some form of digital rights management. You don’t own them; you’ve just been given given permission to listen. Of course, this applies to our modern era. Cassette tapes, CDs, and vinyl records used to be viable formats, and archiving them was easy.

Audiobooks aren’t albums. A typical album can be as short as 30 minutes or less, or almost an hour. The typical unabridged audiobook is around eight hours, and often longer. In December, I listened to several audiobooks that were over twenty hours long. You do the math — the usual unabridged book on tape (literally tape) would come in a box of five or six tapes. That’s how I got started in earnest with the audiobook format in the last 1990s. Publishers, wanting to keep costs down, would often abridge books for physical sales. It wasn’t a good situation. the .mp3 (or .wav, of .m4b) era has been great for keeping the book experience intact, if not as great for ownership and archiving.

Last year, I enjoyed these books. I may get into some of these later, but for now, I’ll just list these. I looked at my list of books last year and these really stood out as my favorites. They were the right book at the right time, for all I know.

Here in the Dark, Alexis Soloski

Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space: A Literary Mixtape, Rémy Ngamije

Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

Junie, Erin Crosby Eckstine

The Favorites, Layne Fargo

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, Griffin Dunne

Deep Cuts, Holly Brickley

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, Hanif Abdurraqib

Beautiful Ugly, Alice Feeney

Sky Daddy, Kate Folk

Broken Country, Claire Leslie Hall

James, Percival Everett

Severance, Ling Ma

All the Mothers Hate Me, Sarah Harman

Tilt, Emma Pattee

I Regret Almost Everything, Keith McNally

The Hike, Lucy Clarke

Alive Day: A Memoir, Katie Fugett

King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby

Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Business Trip, Jessica Garcia

The Turn, Christopher Ransom

The Surf House, Lucy Clarke

El Dorado Drive, Megan Abbott

Katabasis, R.F. Kuang

You Belong Here, Megan Miranda

Heart the Lover, Lily King

The Aviator and the Showman, Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Stoner, John Williams

Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham

I’ll be back on Monday, for real this time.

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I usually check in this space on Monday, but obviously that didn’t work out. I have an excuse. Last week was not great. I’m certain what I am experiencing is not unknown to most of us, including you:

• External forces. The news of the world and the country continues to be bad all around. If you are in the same line of work, you knew this was coming. Now it’s here and unrelenting.

• The daily expectations of life continue. Last week would have been a great week to exercise the privilege of not caring. Yeah. I am now trying to remember what that level of privilege was like.

• We continue to live in a world where we are needed and depend on each other. Below is a picture of my dog, Ridley. He is taking care of his new stuffed toy. He used to chew these toys the point of complete annihilation. Now he nurtures them. I need to learn from Ridley.

Anyway, I decided to increase my monthly contributions to NPR. Hello? Now I get ad-free podcasts. It was a gift to myself.

Also: I am all in with a paper-and-pen pocket calendar that I started using last fall. More accurately, it’s a backpack calendar. It’s been a good way for me to actually think about the schedule I keep. In 25 years, I’ve gotten pretty dependent on Outlook to be live and accurate. In reality, it doesn’t work that way.

The safety tip for this week comes direct from the ACLU. another organization I have a recurring donation set up. They sent my annual card with my name on it, and a wallet-sized bullet-point card entitled “Know Your Rights: Protests”. Even if you aren’t the stand-in-the-street protester type, it’s good to be reminded that these rights should be afforded to those who wish to exercise them.

Thanks to that NPR membership, I listened to a story today about how, while the country watches in sustained horror over the murder of protesters, other state governments are okay with it, and really, people shouldn’t protest because …. it’s a threat to authority. I did check to see what year it was, after hearing that.

It’s nearly mid-week but here’s the accountability stuff for the work I do:

• Participate in a new cross-campus mentoring arrangement. This starts tomorrow and I’m looking forward to it.

• Administrative work is behind. I have time Thursday to catch up. This includes updating language in our unit policy manual.

• Start the summer course plan.

• Block vacation time in July.

• Prepare a proposal for a conference in the fall.

Also, starting this week, I am going to engage with an AI chatbot intentionally, to see if I can develop a mentoring relationship. Does that sound ridiculous? I think it does. Let’s see what happens. I’ll write about it here.

See you later this week.

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I read stuff for work. I read stuff as part of my free-lance side gig. I also pay for a few Patreon and Substack subs. At least a couple of reading-centric sites I pay for are somewhat old-school: they aren’t part of collective platform. They stand alone. The Book Riot blog is like that. The Roger Ebert movie review site has a monthly subscription option, which as far as I can tell, just takes all the annoying ads off the screen. I’ve been paying for Slate since the pandemic, though I’ve been reading that site since 2004.

The first time I ever paid for a web-only publication was Salon.com. It was gift to myself when I got my first full-time salaried position. $35 for the year, back in 2002. This was an expense. The big leap for me was paying for something that I thought would be enriching, informative, and relevant. I just couldn’t touch the product, like a magazine showing up in the mailbox. Salon was one of the first sites I remember expected to see get upated … daily, just once a day, but still. That seemed fast. It was a masthead essentially creating a magazine’s worth of content every day.

Even with my desire to be a kind of futurist, I did not predict where we’d be today. Internet sites come and go, individual creators filling up social media platforms with daily commentary on every damn thing that comes to mind. Kind of what I am doing here. No, wait, exactly what I’m doing here. Content all day, every hour, everflowing.

Last fall I was chatting with a librarian. We talked about a bygone project to index and copy the whole of the internet. That’s a ridiculous thought now, a relic of the Web 2.0 era. It’s not that it’s technically impossible. It’s just, well, more of the question: why would you want to save all the “content” of our current age? With AI now swiftly overtaking social media, my personal desire is to go on full retreat, and read the newspaper. Wait.

I read the local news outlets, as I always have, but two things have happened: those sources have been greatly diminished, and they are all digital. IThe most robust news source in the area reduced their daily output to just several times a week, and much of the content is shared by the national owner (USA Today, which I just now learned is no longer called Gannett). The reduced production wasn’t even the part that killed the print version for me. Delivery was unreliable. stopped getting the local physical newspaper a few years ago. I liked getting the Sunday paper, but when I called to complain, I was told to just rely on the digital publication and be fine with it.

Maybe I romanticized the print newspaper. Maybe I romanticize print books now. I just have a lot of books in the house. I read some, I wait to read others.

Someday I’ll get to more of these books in the house. I am more certain than ever I won’t get to all of them in my lifetime. But I like that they are there. I’ll donate to the library, I’ll check some more out. And I’ll go buy more. The cycle continues.

What I’m reading now:

• Burn Down Master’s House, Clay Cane (audiobook narrated by the author). Riveting, emotional, violent. I’ve grown up reading about chattel slavery. This historical fiction is all about resistance. It goes there, as it should. You’ll see what I mean.

• Escape! A Novel. Stephen Fischbach. Reality television has been around for decades. I’ve watched enough to understand the shorthand used here to tell the story of a fading star and a producer working to make a comeback.

• Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters and Goddesses, by Peter Wolf (audiobook read by the author). I was a fan of J. Geils Band growing up, but only at the end of their time as a band (I was 11). Wolf’s stories are fascinating.

Shameless plug:

I continue to contribute to the Behind the Mic podcast, and now that podcast is a part of Kirkus Reviews. Every month or so I talk about recent audiobooks I’ve enjoyed. Here’s the lastest episode I joined:

Thanks for reading. I’ll be here Monday.

I used to think carrying my passport around was just ridiculous. Not because of any political concerns. I know myself well. That passport is going to get left somewhere. I wouldn’t even take it out of my backpack or satchel. It would get misplaced while I’m at the coffee shop. Something.

Today, I am carrying my passport. I just bought an updated backpack. The passport has a special pocket for just this item. It’s zipped in there, next to my reading glasses and notebook.

I’m also doing other things. A lot of ideas are starting to pop up in my Signal feeds and elsewhere. Not all suggestions are great. And some of the social media posts that suggest steps to take are not much more than someone coming up with content ideas moments before they hit the record button on their iPhone.

(That’s very similar to how I write these Monday posts. It’s a totally different thing.)

Shirin Ali at Slate covers some good points: Reading The Handbook for Constitutional Observers, establishing your community networks, and keeping your phone charged. I’ve been carrying two phone chargers, and I’m probably going to expand to four. I keep them charged daily.

As we continue to move through this moment, I will be using my Monday postings to cover similar suggestions.

In the meantime, I’ll still cover the weekly accountability bullets for work. This week remains unrelenting in expectations. I’ve been framing these deadlines as “life distractions”, which is a fun and not at all dystopian way of using work to distract from life.

Accountability notes for the week of January 26, 2026:

• Updated manuscripts: one may be due tomorrow, pending a possible extension. Don’t judge! A couple of invitations to co-author chapters have been accepted. Two reasons: they sound like good opportunities, and I can’t say no to an invitation to publish something.

• Teaching: The semester has started in earnest. Also, I threw together a pitch for a new course for a certificate program. If that goes anywhere, I’ll discuss it here.

• Administration duties: many meetings this week. So many.

Finally, I have new personal equipment for writing and creating podcast media. It feels a bit more organized, so I’m looking forward to writing here more. At least I will have some kind of record to look back on. See you later this week.