Building Services for My Students: Helping to Share Information and Connections

One of the characteristics that help me stand out in my work is that I often put extra into what I do. I make varying returns on these little investments. Sometimes, my investment is minor, but it can significantly impact me. Other times, I might invest more time and effort, putting in substantially more work without immediate benefits. This extra effort does give me a much higher quality finished product, but I am unsure if the difference in the final product has the same value as the time and effort put forth. This does not mean that investment is necessarily wasted (although I am sure there are many times that I don’t focus on the most important things). These times spent diving into details, working on planning, building systems, and automating processes are helpful for a couple of reasons.

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One common place I find myself getting lost in the details is preparing content for lectures ¹. I will spend significant time considering what to include, strategizing how to present the material, going back to the sources, and trying to find high-quality sources. One example of my obsessing over what source I should use was for a presentation I did with a few colleagues before the start of the semester. Before each semester, our university faculty spend a day organized around a theme and professional development. My small group’s topic focused on sharing self-care practices we are integrating into our classroom environment and providing some ideas of how other instructors could do the same. I wanted to ground our discussion in the reality of stress and its impact. Readings, training, and discussions have frequently generally discussed the impact that trauma and stress have on our minds, bodies, and social environment throughout my experience in the mental health world. I wanted to share a concise description of what stress looks like. This led me to spend a few hours reading journal articles, returning to some books, and trying to determine the best source. Most sources were not what I wanted to share or were way more technical than I wanted to get into. My message was at its essence: stress causes people problems. In my mind, I felt I needed to have some fancy journal article to cite this. In the end, I moved away from a more formal source and just used the description provided by the American Institute of Stress and their article How Stress Affects your Body and Mind. While it isn’t as strong of an academic source, it is appropriate for what I wanted to share. I was just overthinking what to use and spending more time than I should have.

This type of going down unplanned rabbit trails or obsessing about some of the details does mean that I potentially spent longer than I could have on developing the presentation. But it also makes for an improved final product. I also don’t consider the time wasted, even for the material I didn’t use, as it provided me the opportunity to increase the depth and breadth of my knowledge. Often, doing extra allows me to grow and improve while providing an improved product. That makes the extra effort I put into things often helpful and something I should consider doing. You can see the presentation we did Spring 2025 Faculty Day Breakout Session: Bringing Peace & Ease During Changing Times.

Building My Presentations WebsitePermalink

My ability to embed this above-mentioned presentation is available due to another example of the extra effort I have put into my work. I have a sub-section of my website dedicated to my presentations. When I started sharing papers and writings as academic resources for people, I had some opportunities many years ago to add presentations I had given as an MSW student using SlideShare (now owned by LinkedIn) Directions Program Effectiveness Study Presentations. These were one-off examples and wanted to have a way to easily share the content. I’m always lurking around the internet, seeing how people share information and what they do. I follow a number of technology professionals, and many of them give talks. I remember seeing people have online portfolios of their talks and sharing their slides. In 2019, when I presented at a breakout session for a conference for support staff hosted by OSPI, it seemed the perfect opportunity to develop my own portfolio. You can see Foundational Aspects of Evidence-Based Classrooms: Supporting Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities that I presented at that conference.

I started looking at some of the systems to build a public speaking portfolio and came across Notist. It is an excellent service and worked well for my needs for many years. I started posting and sharing all the presentations, teaching as an adjunct. One of the best aspects was that you could use a custom domain if you have a paid account, which I needed for the number of presentations I posted each year). Fast forward to the summer of 2024. I decided I didn’t want to pay the $100 per year for the service. I also wanted to share my notes more easily. Their service has a way of including my lecture notes, as I do now, but I had to copy and paste each section individually.

So, I decided to make a new Jekyll site to post all of my presentations (you can see all of the code on Github²). I am using the same javascript that Notist had for embedding the slides and CSS they had for using the present feature, but otherwise, I designed my new portfolio the way I wanted it to be. I also built a shortcut so that I could cycle through my previous presentations one at a time and download all of the information I had posted on my Notist account. It took me significant time to develop the shortcut, design the website, and the pattern used to build the presentations. Having well over 100 presentations, just going through them was also a slog.

Posting copies of the PDF of the presentation like an animal.

During the summer, I was able to do the old content part, but I ran out of time to develop a process for converting new presentations. The new school year started as along with my transition to a full-time associate professor. My time became very constrained and I couldn’t actually use my new website to share new presentations. I had to put it back on the shelf, and so I went back to the most straightforward approach–posting copies of the PDF of the presentation in MyHeritage like an animal. Honestly, this approach might have been the best option based on the required effort. However, I wanted to have the satisfaction of using my personally designed tool and continue increasing my skills.

When winter break came and the fall semester ended, I picked the project back up. At first, I wanted to build a text-based user interface using the terminal. This approach felt too cumbersome, and it was hard to get the data. I wanted to make it quick and easy to post my slides. I opted for Shortcuts, and my final implementation was the most complicated workflow I have ever built. I have some actions in it that do some bash and python scripting, which I got a lot of help from ChatGPT on developing and problem solving. The following is the general flow of the Shortcut.

• Select a file (a PDF of a presentation) and convert each page to an image.
• Count the images and ask for input to share the content of the notes for each of the slides
• Confirm there are the same number of headings and images
• Make an ID code for the presentation
• Ask for data needed to build the presentation pages (e.g., title, description, date, tags, etc.)
• Take the converted images and sent them to ChatGPT’s API to generate alt text for each image (Jarrod Blundy’s post Generate Alt Text with OpenAI Vision Shortcut helped me build this)
• Resize images to thumbnail size and export the set of images to the appropriate folder
• Export the PDF renamed to the appropriate folder
• Build text pages for the presentation, embed, present, and slides
• Copy the embed code to include in our content mangagment system
• Open the newly created page so I can verify it worked

Each time I run the script and see it build my site, it makes me happy. I write all of my lecture notes in plain text/markdown and use Sublime Text 3. To try to remove some of the friction, I also created a script (with the help of ChatGPT) that copies the correct text needed to be processed by the shortcut (I also made a similar one for the emails I send out).

Eventually, I want to adapt the same design style to the rest of my website, maybe that will be my summer project this year. Based on the hours I spent creating this, an argument could be made that it wasn’t worth it, but it is something extra that I can do. It adds a high-quality learning material for my students, has increased my development skills, and gives me satisfaction so I am pleased that I have done it. It also has some qualities that are better for students. For example, the slides section now includes my notes and more in-depth content, especially because my slide design tends to be more minimalist. I like sharing the information into the world, and the pages have a lot of traffic that goes to them. It has led to people reaching out and making connections in the world.

Building My Now PagePermalink

While I couldn’t finish my presentation website in the fall, I built another entirely different website to provide a service to assist in collaboration. I am primarly based in Toppenish and spend one or two days there a week. It is also over an hour (in my head cannon I have to tell myself it is 1.5 hours so that I can make sure I get places on time). I have an office there, but I also have an office at our Tri-Cities Campus. I sometimes work from my home office or have appointments at agencies or other places. So I’m really all over the place. I have kept my general schedule as consistent as possible; it changes frequently based on my needs. I considered the Outlook Booking with Me Feature, but it doesn’t really give a way to share different locations (only remote or in the office) and I only share all the details of my calendar events with the faculty in my department.

My first thought, and still something I am highly likely to do, was to build an E-Ink display that I could display information on and update from anywhere. I kind of want to build my own, but a pre-created package like Trmnl would be pretty amazing. It is just that I need at least two of whatever I use. I like building my static Jekyll sites, and when your only tool is a hammer, you tend to use it, so that is what I did. I built a pretty simple website.

This website was much less onerous to build. I bought a domain a while back vsp.ink and had the tagline “A place for stuff to spill out from Jacob Campbell.” The VSP is a part of my name (you can see my contact page where I talk about it). I also really like having a website that is a total of six characters. I’m also using it for a few other purposes ³. While what I have created is not a traditional /Now page, I do like the idea of them and have thought about making my own for years. Most people use a now page to share general things they are working on, reading, doing etc. Think maybe in a couple of weeks or a month. Mine updates daily, but I might add a currently page that share more general things I’m doing.

The website takes data from weekly and daily notes to display my current day. I generally update the pages using Obsidian and a few plugins git and periodic notes. Each week I create a weekly note that just includes the week dates (to display on the now page) and frontmatter data for each day. In that frontmatter, I review my calendar for the week and add where I plan to be each day using the following temples:

🏡 Work from Home
🏫 Toppenish Campus
🏫 Kennewick Campus, 🌃🏫 CBC Campus
🫥 by appt only
🚘 Community Appts
🌃🏫 CBC Campus
🛩️ Traveling
🚑 Medical

I have a personal automation that runs each morning at six am to trigger the repo to build and deploy so that the date gets updated and removes the previous day from the now page. Then, each day, I try to add my schedule that day. I open up the note for the day in Obsidian. I often write a short description of what I’m doing that day in general. I have a shortcut that can make a markdown list of my calendar events. I edit anything that shouldn’t be posted publicly and type a few keyboard commands:

⌘P Git: stage current file
⌘P Git: commit staged files
⌘P Git: push

I just have to start typing each of those commands and click some quick returns, and a few minutes later, the website will rebuild with the new information. It is extra and beyond what anybody else does, but I like that I have it. My students look at it and plan talking to me or joining my office hours. Sometimes, I don’t update the daily note, but the weekly note still generally shows where I will be at for each day.

We can’t do the extra all of the time or for everything. But I think it is good for us to look towards what some of the extra is that we can do.