Facilitator: Dr Kirstin Krauss has extensive experience in leading research capacity building initiatives and business development for scholarly services companies. He is a leading authority and subject matter expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence and academic writing, with a combined 25+ years of extensive experience making a notable impact in business, education, and research. Kirstin holds a PhD in Informatics, from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, focusing on ICT for Development and Critical Ethnography, while his entire career consistently focused on ensuring that ethical standards and integrity are observed as the foundation to research relevance and business leadership.
Kirstin has taken on several advisory roles in areas related to research capacity building and doctoral programme reviews, research integrity services, education consulting, artificial intelligence, and project coordination for startup companies. He is a part-time Research Advisor at Worldwide Information Services (WWIS), where he facilitates Research Capacity Development workshops and services for the WWIS Academy. In prior roles as a Professor at UNISA (2017-2022) and Associate Professor at Rhodes University (2012-2016), he focused predominantly on postgraduate student development and supervision capacity building in the Information Systems discipline. His research focuses mainly on ICT for Development, Critical Ethnography, Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, and scholarly writing, and mitigating questionable scholarly practices. Kirstin has been invited and acknowledged by several associations and universities to deliver guest lectures and keynotes. These include the University of Cape Town, the University of the Free State, Ghana Technology University College, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Central University of Technology (Free State), Milpark Education, North-West University in South Africa, University of Pretoria, Rhodes University, University of the Witwatersrand, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, STADIO Higher Education, Uganda Martyrs University in Kampala, Academic Conferences International, an International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) conference, and the Southern African Chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AISSAC). Kirstin serves on the advisory board for the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC)/Wiley Author Engagement Programme. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirstin-krauss
Target Group: Postgraduate students and Emerging researchers
Background: The emergence of chatbots and AI-driven research support tools has the potential to challenge, support, and significantly alter our approaches to science and scientific knowledge production. AI tools and chatbots are becoming ingrained in almost all aspects of scientific knowledge production, from supporting topic discovery, scholarly writing, and assessment, to understanding theoretical elaboration, disciplinary and contextual relevance, and copyright issues. AI-powered tools can either support or distort our ability to craft arguments in writing; they may affect our ability to defend specific claims in research; they can assist with topic discovery and information overload; they can strengthen or dilute academic writing; AI can help with developing legitimization criteria for research, but it can also significantly challenge what scientists consider to be the core of scientific research. The reality is that researchers, supervisors, and postgraduate students should remain vigilant and ethical, and continually seek ways to protect the relevance of scientific endeavours.
The workshop will focus on:
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Introducing the basic principles of dissertation/thesis writing and argumentation
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Using AI for topic discovery
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Research integrity and scholarly writing
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Practical group activities
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Group mentoring and Q&A sessions: In this session participants will be able to ask specific questions related to their studies.
Requirements:
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Participants should bring along a draft research manuscript, e.g., a draft paper or thesis/dissertation.
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Participants should bring along their own laptops and ensure that that they have access to the internet.
This workshop is funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) through the University Capacity Development Grant (UCDG)
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