Category: Writing
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Using Obsidian for academic writing and creativity
In this conversation with Dave Nicholls, I describe how I use Obsidian to support my academic writing and creative process, in response to Dave’s question: Is using Obsidian worth it? I explain how I’ve set up different vaults in Obsidian, depending on what it is that I’m trying to do, and use examples from my…
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Why publish-or-perish? Why not, publish-and-prosper?
It’s weird to think of some of the things we take for granted in higher education. Surely one of the worst is to be taken in by the publish-or-perish mindset; the idea that, unless you publish you have no future in academia. That you’ll be punished, or worse, that you’ll ‘perish’: To die or be destroyed, especially…
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More than my h-index – African Doctoral Academy
The presentation was given to a group of early career researchers and PhD students as part of the African Doctoral Academy. Download the slides. The main premise of my presentation was that academics are often driven to measure the quality of our work by quantitative metrics and journal impact factors because those are relatively easy…
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Bring on the algorithmic scrutiny of academic work
I’m reviewing a grant application and it’s been… hard. I feel reasonably confident that I can quickly get my head around a research project but sometimes the writing is so poor that I have to read some passages 5 times before (I think) I understand what’s going on. So I was delighted to find explainjargon.com,…
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Thinking in public: From note to publication – A conversation with David Nicholls
Towards the end of 2021 I recorded a conversation with David Nicholls.[1] I wanted to talk to Dave about his process for converting incoming information into the kinds of outputs that so many in the health professions community find valuable. We talked about how we both try to limit the information we’re exposed to, how we…
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Thinking in public: A conversation with Tom Jesson
Tom Jesson is a physiotherapist, and self-employed researcher and writer based in Houston Texas, who I’ve wanted to speak to for a while. While I’ve always known Tom to be a thoughtful and careful writer, evident in his work that’s been published and shared widely in physiotherapy circles, I’ve not really thought much about how…
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Resource: An overview of note-taking workflow and tools from Ton Zijlstra
There are hundreds of resources on note-taking systems so don’t take this post as anything more than a collection that caught my attention. Once you go down the ‘zettelkasten’ or ‘digital garden’ rabbit holes, you may find that it takes a while to get out again. If you already have a sense of what the…
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‘Structured serendipity’ in collaborative writing
In this video I’m talking to Ben Gordon, a physiotherapist in Boston with an interest in the role of machine learning in clinical practice. Ben and I have been working on the very early stages of writing an article together, and quickly became frustrated with the limitations of working collaboratively in Google Docs. We started…
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Quickly capturing the essence of a new idea
Sometimes I come across a novel idea or new concept that I’m unfamiliar with, and recognise that it’s something I should spend some time getting to grips with. But even though I’m interested in the idea and know that it’s important, I’m busy with something else and either don’t have the time or the bandwidth…
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Using Hypothesis and Zotero to create notes while reading online
In this short video I demonstrate how I take notes using Hypothes.is while reading on the web and in Zotero. I try to show the early stages of creating links between ideas that I’m interested in, and eventually where I add those ideas into my permanent notes. I didn’t do much planning for this video;…
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Types of notes for academics
I used to think of all notes as the same regardless of where I took them, what I intended doing with them, and what purpose they served. Then about a year ago I realised that this ad hoc approach to note-taking was serving my needs as a knowledge worker and so started thinking about academic…
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Why and How Academics Write
Badley, G. F. (2020). Why and How Academics Write. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(3–4), 247–256. …non-academics regard writing as bullshit when it is abstract and vague and full of jargon. Here, academics are accused of hiding behind prose which is dense, exaggerated, obfuscating, overblown, and full of deepities as our frequent claims to profundity have been termed.…
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Twelve tips for getting your manuscript published
Cook, D. A. (2016). Twelve tips for getting your manuscript published. Medical Teacher, 38(1), 41–50. Getting the manuscript ready 1. Plan early to get it out the door. Write regularly – even if it’s for shorter periods – because it’s hard to find large blocks of time, which means that you don’t write very often.…
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Summary: Ten simple rules for structuring papers
Good scientific writing is essential to career development and to the progress of science. A well-structured manuscript allows readers and reviewers to get excited about the subject matter, to understand and verify the paper’s contributions, and to integrate these contributions into a broader context. However, many scientists struggle with producing high-quality manuscripts and are typically…
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PSA: Writing is hard
A few days ago I submitted a chapter for an edited collection on Speculative Futures for Artificial Intelligence and Educational Inclusion and I thought I’d take a moment to share some of my experience in writing it. When I talk about writing with colleagues I get the impression that they’re waiting for the moment when…
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A critical pedagogy for online learning in physiotherapy education
Earlier this year the Critical Physiotherapy Network published Manipulating practices: A critical physiotherapy reader. The book is a collection of critical writing from a variety of authors dealing with a range of topics related to physiotherapy practice and education. One of the interesting features of this collection is that it is completely open access, which…
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Give feedback on “A critical digital pedagogy for education in the 21st century”?
Update (12-02-18): You can now download the full chapter here (A critical pedagogy for online learning in physiotherapy education) and the edited collection here. I finally managed to put together some ideas for my chapter on critical digital pedagogy in the CPN book on critical perspectives in practice. I split the chapter into 4 sections, excluding an introduction and conclusion…
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Critical digital pedagogy: Weapon of mass instruction
Update (12-02-18): You can now download the full chapter here (A critical pedagogy for online learning in physiotherapy education) and the edited collection here. Update (22-02-17): This post has been modified from the original. Changes include updated in-text citations, minor grammatical improvements and an added reference list. Yesterday I posted the first section of my…