Talking Academic Communication

This post by  Chris Ireland  looks at how ChatGPT is being viewed in education and argues that we need to embrace it rather than fight it. Twenty years ago we were talking about the scourge of copying from the Internet and pasting it into essays. We were told that we had to change our assessment practices. A few did but most just carried on with the help of plagiarism detection tools such as Turnitin. Then came the age of the ghostwriter. Companies were openly advertising, many still do, bespoke essay writing services via the Internet, on campuses and even via advertising media (Bomford, 2016). We were again told to change our assessment practices. A few more did but many again trusted the plagiarism detection industry to deal with the issue. While they should be expected to mop up the 'off the shelf' ghosting with ease, there is something about 'bespoke ghost writing' that suggests plenty have slipped and will continue to slip through the net. This brings us to the pre...

This post by Chris Ireland is about conducting Searches in Google Scholar and making use of multiple wildcards to quickly identify useful sources. Despite its title, ‘Google Scholar’ is often viewed with scepticism, with its usefulness as an academic research tool being one issue often raised (Le & Nguyen, 2022) and its efficiency in finding suitable sources another (Loan & Sheikh, 2018) . Indeed, concern  over the quality of the results it produces have often been highlighted  with its comprehensive system of indexing, which relies entirely on automated processes and therefore allows some non-scholarly sources through ( Harzing , 2020), compared to more selective databases which, unlike Google Scholar, often maintain some human intervention (Gray et al., 2012). However, despite these criticisms Google Scholar is widely reported as being the largest academic search engine or database ( Gusenbauer , 2019; Octavianus & Fachrudin , 2022) and considered  as t...