Tag: 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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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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It takes effort to understand…
“…the act of writing forces me to think a bit more than clicking once and having it served up from an automated system. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate my knowledge are manual activities, requiring effort on my…
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For email subscribers to usr/space: Updating notification preferences
If you’re an email subscriber to this site, you may want to update your notification preferences. The way I’ll be using the site is going to change over the next couple of weeks, and you may already have noticed an increase in the type and frequency of posts. I basically have plans to write more,…
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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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Comment: AI-written blog posts are spam
The problem with AI-generated articles isn’t that they are fake, but that they are mediocre. The purpose of writing is not just about sharing your thoughts with others; it’s about adding value. Werdmüller, B. (2022). AI-written blog posts are spam. Great twist at the end of this article. Highly recommended for anyone who cares about…
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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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Weekly digest (17-21 May 2021)
Checco, A., Bracciale, L., Loreti, P., Pinfield, S., & Bianchi, G. (2021, May 17). Can AI be used ethically to assist peer review? Impact of Social Sciences. …an AI tool which screens papers prior to peer review could be used to advise authors to rework their paper before it is sent on for peer review.…