At most small institutions, the problem is not that IR can’t produce data. The problem is that nobody has time to think about what it means – including the IR director producing it. I run a three-person IR office at a Lasallian Catholic university in the Bronx. We produce enrollment reports, retention analyses, IPEDS submissions,…
I thought the next layer would be more Obsidian configuration. It wasn’t. More graph view, more backlinks, more manual connection-making. That is what I used to do in Roam. I would spend real time threading notes together, following paths between ideas, maintaining a map of how everything connected. I did not do any of that….
I did not add backlinks. That was supposed to be the next step. The May 9 post said so explicitly. I had Obsidian pointed at the folder, the graph view was open, and the Zettelkasten people would tell you this is where the system comes alive. You start linking notes to each other. The connections…
I added Obsidian last. That was the right order. Most people building a personal knowledge system do it backwards. They install Obsidian first, configure a vault, explore the plugins, build a folder structure for notes they have not written yet. Then they discover that the system needs content to be useful, and content is harder…
The system runs on one folder. Insid that folder are plain text files, organized into directories. No proprietary database. No SaaS subscription that can change its pricing or deprecate a feature. The intelligence is not stored in the files. The files are context. The intelligence is in the AI that reads them before it…
I want to tell you what happened the last time I walked out of a back-to-back meeting block with three things spinning in my head. I took a screenshot of an email with a deadline in it. I sent a three-sentence voice memo to myself, half-formed, about a project that had stalled. I forwarded a…
I was scrolling through my feed last week when something stopped me. It looked like an interview, someone in a professional setting, answering thoughtful questions about AI adoption. It had the shape of a think piece. It was a sales presentation. The product was expertise itself. I have seen this advertisement before. Not this one…
I’ve been through every productivity system you’ve heard of and a few you probably haven’t. I’ve built Kanbans and Zettelkastens and cycled through Evernote, Obsidian, Roam Research, Notion. During my doctoral program I ran a paper planner alongside digital tools, alongside whatever else I was trying that year. Most of it worked. Which is what…
What an incredible finale to an amazing week at the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) Forum! I was deeply honored to share the stage with a powerhouse panel for the closing keynote: Our session, “Navigating Tomorrow: Exploring the Implications of AI in Higher Education,” grappled with the profound ways artificial intelligence is reshaping our institutions….
What an amazing week at the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) Forum! I was privileged to present with the great and powerful, Dr. Jason Simon Jason and I led a session on generative AI in Institutional Research. In our hands-on workshop, we explored key skills like prompt engineering and worked through practical IR use cases….
