Tag: writing
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Building custom GPTs to provide feedback on samples of writing
Introduction “Our results show that i) ChatGPT is capable of generating more detailed feedback that fluently and coherently summarizes students’ performance than human instructors; ii) ChatGPT achieved high agreement with the instructor when assessing the topic of students’ assignments; and iii) ChatGPT could provide feedback on the process of students completing the task, which benefits…
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AI for research – African Doctoral Academy
I gave this presentation on AI in research for participants at the African Doctoral Academy. I highlighted the fact that generative AI as a sophisticated tool that predicts text and generates coherent multimodal content. The presentation discussed AI’s potential in roles like idea generation and data analysis, its current limitations like bias, and emphasised the…
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Podcast: Using language models to support thinking
in AIhttps://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/using-chatgpt-as-a-copilot-for-your-mind/ “In this episode, Nathan chats to Dan Shipper, CEO and Co-founder of Every, for the series “How I Use Chat-GPT”. They discuss Nathan’s prompting techniques for creative and cognitive labour, and using GPT in copilot instead of delegation mode.” I got a lot of practical advice out of this episode. Strongly recommended if you’re…
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My Physiopedia Plus courses on building skills for learning
In 2023 I put together a series of short courses for Physiopedia Plus, on the topic of building skills to support learning, which were published towards the end of the year. The stats (see image above) suggest that they’ve been well-received so far. Overview of all courses in the series, and here are the individual…
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Physiopedia courses on developing skills to support learning
During 2023 I prepared a series of courses for Physiopedia Plus, aimed at helping students develop skills to support their learning. These courses are an extension of the Learning to Learn In Beta project I started a few years ago. Here are the courses on Physiopedia Plus, which are are accredited in Australia, South Africa,…
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Claude, help me convert a process into a narrative
Recently I needed to provide a description of a process that we’re going to implement for an upcoming conference, but the process we’d developed in our meetings was written as a list i.e. short, incomplete sentences in bullet point format. We wanted to submit a narrative description so I took that outline and gave it…
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Taylor and Francis clarifies their position on the use of AI for academic content creation
https://newsroom.taylorandfrancisgroup.com/taylor-francis-clarifies-the-responsible-use-of-ai-tools-in-academic-content-creation/ “Taylor & Francis recognizes the increased use of AI tools in academic research. As the world’s leading publisher of human-centered science, we consider that such tools, where used appropriately and responsibly, have the potential to augment research outputs and thus foster progress through knowledge.” They go on to say: “…AI tools must not be…
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Focus on what you can do with AI
“ChatGPT can write a funny poem about a peanut butter sandwich, but it doesn’t know how to write an effective email to the Dean’s office at my university with a subtle question about our hiring policies.” – Cal Newport
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Claude, help me to write
Yesterday I published a post describing my concerns with how universities are responding to the new paradigm of expertise-on-demand that’s facilitated by generative AI. At the end of that post I noted that I wrote it collaboratively with Claude, and this post describes what that process (kind-of) looked like. I also want to be clear…
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Claude, help me draft the outline of my academic paper
My last 2 posts have dealt with 1) the use of Claude to complete a peer review, and 2) how journals could include this process in their workflow. It follows that authors should be using LLMs as well. There are the obvious use cases; rephrasing passages, summarising, expanding, correcting, and so on. However, I think…
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Claude, you are an expert peer-reviewer…
I recently completed a peer review for an academic journal, and as I was submitting it I wondered how Claude would perform if given the task. Since the article was anonymised, I didn’t think there’d be any problems uploading the PDF and asking Claude to review it. And, I had already submitted my review so…
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Prompts you can use to train ChatGPT to write in your style
This article describes 5 steps you can take to train ChatGPT to write in your style. Full disclosure; I haven’t tried it but given my previous experiences with ChatGPT, it seems plausible. As I said, I haven’t tried this but it seems like the kind of thing that’s possible. Having said that, I don’t see…
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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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Sharing rejections…
in ScholarshipI’m about to post three pieces of work that I submitted for presentation at the 2023 AMEE conference, all of which were rejected. I have two reasons for sharing these rejections: And maybe it’s also worth adding that rejection need not equal failure, if the work being rejected was a stepping stone to something else.…
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Having a conversation with an article through natural language processing
Thanks to Ben Gordon for pointing me towards explainpaper. In How to read a book (1972), Mortimer Adler says that “Reading…should be a conversation between you and the author.” Which is why I don’t read without a figurative pen in my hand; As I’m reading I want to mark up the text with questions and…
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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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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…