iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Great call to action in community pharmacy research from Ade Williams @adewilliams.bsky.social #UKSBM2025

Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

This article misunderstands how you can effectively use LLMs for academic writing. The error is common among my colleagues. I teach my students to write using LLM+RAG and writing style prompts. scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/03/11/g.... Comment is in the image

The author misunderstands how LLMs can be useful in writing articles. Using LLMs without using RAG is just relying on the patterns learned in the training of the model. If you know the relevant literature, using RAG, it fetches the relevant info from the papers you give it, adds it to the prompt and generates a response based on the relevant retrieved information. This addresses issues with hallucinations, cut off dates and citations. Tools like ChatGPTs Deep Research, and The-Literature add search to the beginning of this process.

My students know that if want an essay out of an LLM, upload the PDFs of the papers in the reading list, the assessment guidance and the marking criteria. If they are using notebookLM, they could listen to a chatty podcast, or chat to the podcast in interactive mode to give them ideas for prompts.

If you can’t train your students to do better than LLMs plus RAG, then their graduate jobs aren’t going to be around for long. Pretending LLMs fed with the relevant literature and trained in a academic writing style (like notebookLM is trained to generate output in a podcast style) is to bury your head in the sand. Knowledge work is going to change and we have to prepare ourselves and our students for what’s coming. If Google trained a LLM on all the lectures that were captured over the pandemic, they could have create an automatic lecture generator, that fed with relevant papers could generate a lecture. It’s so obvious someone will. Like Uber drivers are really training the driving model that will replace them, all our open papers and lectures, not to mention all our feedback on Turnitin, are training the models that will replace us if we can’t to do more than just regurgitate knowledge. This article doesn’t illuminate the work we’ve got ahead of us

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Will the use of generative AI shift higher education from a knowledge-first system to a skills-first system? - HEPI search.app/DvsRQJAR5r58...

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Challenged myself to write a single prompt for gpt4o that makes a game - came up with this after lots of iteration - now got a challenge going at work - who can make the best game from a single prompt (prompt in the alt text) #gamefromaprompt

Create an Asteroids-style game where I control a spaceship that moves with the arrow keys and fires lasers with the space bar. The game should start with multiple asteroids that move randomly across the screen. When a laser hits an asteroid, the asteroid should explode into two smaller asteroids if it's large enough, or disappear if it's small. If asteroids collide with each other, they should also shatter into smaller pieces. Additionally, if an asteroid collides with the spaceship, the game should end. When all asteroids are cleared, a new wave should appear, increasing the number of asteroids by one in each new wave. Also, add a score counter that increases when I destroy asteroids. Provide the full game as an HTML file with a link so that I can download and run in my browser, with all JavaScript included in the HTML file itself.

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

Ottoline Leyser warns of long-term public spending pressures and expects university “consolidation process” [and] that research budgets “will be tight” in the coming years, given growing pressures on public spending www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

I cannot fathom the effect of this cut on overheads. It's going to be brutal. Given the benefits funding brings (www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...) this seems like a wild act of self harm.

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

On #nationaILEGOday I should out myself as a Lego Serious Play certified facilitator

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

UKRI prepares ‘response plan’ for university closures: www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Just waiting for the flourishing to kick in.

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

We had a huge turn out for the launch of our distal upper limb pain self management app - DMAPP. It was great to see the stakeholders who had been through the 30 hour co-design process and feel the sort of energy in the room that Grindell describes medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/medicine/dir...

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

I read The Innovators Dilemma around the time I started playing with gpt3. Traditional universities are like Debenhams in the 90s observing Amazon selling beanie babies, thinking the linen counter and the cafe will keep them safe. I think It's going to be rough. www.forbes.com/sites/bryanp...

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Tomorrow I'll be teaching our MSc students about developing search terms and PRISMA-S. This week's MF DOOM quote can be enjoyed in 4k thanks to the new remaster youtu.be/ru2IrTY2UG0?...

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

I've said it elsewhere, but given this is starting to feel like a place to hang out, it bears repeating. I'm somewhat overwhelmed to have been nominated to be president elect of The UK Society for Behavioural Medicine. Take a look at uksbm.org.uk if you haven't already.

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

To try Google's notebookLM, set your VPN to USA, and you are in. It's basically Notion.ai with selectable sources, but the output is less detailed, it lacks the language tools Notion has, and it seems to struggle to hold on to the context you are prompting - eg this answer uses a source context

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 23/10/2023

After chatting with @DrAnnaWeighall I made a chatbot with access to academic papers that test or discuss LLMs capacity to pass assessments in Higher Education. I asked it to assess my university policy on unfair means & #GenAI in assessment #AcademicChatter #LLMs #HigherEducation

The weaknesses in this passage about Generative AI (GenAI) include:

Lack of discussion on the limitations of GenAI: While the passage mentions that GenAl is fallible, it does not provide a comprehensive exploration of its limitations. It is important for users to understand that GenAl does not possess true understanding or critical thinking abilities like humans do. It relies on the data it is trained on and may produce inaccurate or misleading information.

Insufficient guidance on responsible use: While the passage briefly mentions the

Importance of responsible and ethical use of GenAl, it does not provide detailed

guidelines on how to ensure such use. It would be beneficial to include specific

recommendations on verifying and fact-checking the information generated by

GenAl, as well as the importance of critically evaluating its outputs.

Lack of emphasis on the need for human creativity and originality: The passage mentions that using GenAl can enrich one's creativity, but it

This policy falls short of the academic literature in a few ways. Firstly, it does not specifically address the potential misuse of generative language models, such as GenAl, in academic work. While it mentions the risk of using GenAl responses as an unfair advantage, it does not provide detailed guidance on how to detect and prevent such misuse.

Secondly, the policy does not discuss the limitations of current methods for detecting machine-generated text. It is important to note that there are currently no widely accepted or reliable tools that can accurately detect machine-generated text. This means that even if a student makes a full disclosure of their use of GenAl, it may still be challenging for educators to determine if the work includes machine-generated content. Additionally, the policy does not address the ethical considerations associated with the use of generative language models. It is crucial for students to understand the importance of academic integrity, including prope

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Ian Kellar @driankellar.bsky.social · 14/10/2023

"Hard times makes strong men" stuff in academia is BS. If leadership plays Devil takes the hindmost, colleagues only compete not to be last. Ensure everyone, especially the marginalised and unseen, know like they belong. Then we all do our best work.

A jigsaw image representing inclusivity in research

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