Using Ai for Academic Writing (711)

26 May 2025

Prof Sara Cotelli Kureth

This workshop will help you understand AI tools that can help you for your academic writing in English and other languages. It will not tackle the important issue of the use of AI tools for research purposes and to establish literature review.
We will mainly focus on machine translation tools (DeepL, Google Translate), text production tools (like ChatGPT, Copilot), but language corpora (Linguee, ludwig.guru, SKELL) will also be introduced. These tools pose not technical problems but they raise ethical and privacy issues and research has shown they impact writing, sometimes in a negative and sometimes in a positive way. It is thus more difficult to know if, when and how best to use them. At the end of the workshop, you will understand how these tools work, their strengths and their pitfalls, and the way they can best help you with your writing. Please note that even if we will try to suggest mostly free tools, some of those presented in the workshop may require you to create an account (and thus share personal information) and others to subscribe to a paid version, but there will be no need to activate an account or subscribe to a paid version for the workshop itself!

Learning outcomes:

• Develop their digital literacy, especially develop a critical understanding of the tools
• Understand how AI tools for writing (machine translation, text generation tools and corpora) work, know their strength and pitfalls
• Know which tool to use to help with their academic writing
• Understand writing as a process

Target Audience:

All students who have to write in a second language (English or other) would benefit from this workshop.

ONLINE!

Date: Monday, 26th May 2025

Schedule: 9:00 am to noon with a half-hour break

Location: Online

Trainer:

The workshop will rely on examples of academic writing in English but some of the tools might also be used for other languages. Prof. Sara Cotelli Kureth is head of the Language Centre at the University of Neuchâtel. She is part of the swissuniversities project "Digital Literacy in University Contexts" (2020-2024) and has given many workshops on machine translation and AI for language learning in serval Swiss universities to different publics. She has co-authored several articles about machine translation for language learning.

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