I’ve been working with Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, for about a year. We’ve become… close. People laugh when I call Claude my ‘work husband’. I’m not really joking. Like a good work spouse, Claude is always there to help and never gets tired of my stories. Claude cheerfully does the tasks I hate, …continue reading.

The other day, my good friend Professor Narelle Lemon sent me a link to an academic paper called “AI and its implications for research in higher education: a critical dialogue”  because it cited … one of my old blog posts. It’s a good paper, and open access, so I recommend having a read. It’s written …continue reading.

For about 10 years now, I’ve had a profitable side hustle teaching writing. ANU has a generous external consulting policy, which means I can fly all over the country, and the world, teaching academics to be better writers. With the invention of ChatGPT (or as my sister Anitra dubbed it, ChattieG), I expected this work …continue reading.

By now regular readers will know I’m obsessed with how academics work. Maybe it’s because I’m constantly trying to figure out how to work better myself (aren’t we all?). Or perhaps it’s because I’ve spent years watching brilliant people struggle with the demands of academic life. Whatever the reason, I’m thrilled to announce that my …continue reading.

Ok, it wasn’t a fancy academic book, but still… I want to share how we did it, and what we learned about generative AI in the process, but first some context. For a long time, my friend Professor Narelle Lemon and I have talked about writing a book called ‘Rich Academic / Poor Academic’. The …continue reading.

I’m working on the second edition of ‘How to fix your academic writing trouble’ with Katherine Firth at the moment. We’re doing a new chapter on writing process, specifically how to think with generative AI tools. For inspiration, I am thinking about Artist Studios and how they support making work. Artist studios are filled with …continue reading.

In May 2023, Eirini Tzouma asked me participate in a panel on Neurodiversity at the Durham Centre for Academic Development post graduate research conference. Sadly, I had prior commitments, but we did arrange to meet afterwards so Eirini could share what happened with me. I don’t publish guest posts regularly anymore, but after this discussion …continue reading.

Happy new year everyone! It’s summer here in Australia, where we take a long break. I want to talk about Tidying in this post, but first – some news: ‘How to fix your academic writing trouble’ continues to be a strong seller after 5 years, but Large Language Models (LLM) like Chattie G (Chat GPT) …continue reading.

We have to talk about ChatGPT, or as my sister @anitranot styles it, ‘ChattieG.’ (which is both funnier and easier to say). The reaction to Chattie in academia seems to oscillate between moral panic (“OMG, The Youngs will cheat on their assignments!!”) and world-weary cynicism (“it writes like shit anyway”). Very few people seem to …continue reading.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post called ‘The enshittification of academic social media’, riffing on ideas put in the world by Cory Doctorow. It’s fair to say, this post was a minor viral hit, resulting in me being interviewed by Geraldine Dougue on ABC radio, and a piece in The Australian, which …continue reading.