With the help of Stellenbosch University, and particularly InnovUS, we have developed Abstrahere Academic, which is a web application and tool to assist masters and doctoral students in the critical analysis of academic texts.
Abstrahere Academic focuses on academic environments, and assists master’s and PhD students to improve and apply their critical reading skills – an important part of their thesis writing. Open and healthy communication between student and academic supervisor about critical text analysis is an integral part of the reading and writing process.
Master’s and doctoral students received an e-mail invitation from WARP Development to obtain access to the Abstrahere Academic application on the following link: http://academic.abstrahere.co.za
Using the application, you can upload scientific articles directly by selecting either File or URL. You will then be guided by online prompts to analyse the content, and by submitting your responses to a Critical Reading Box you make your own unique summaries for inclusion in the literature survey, theoretical foundations, discussion or conclusions of your thesis/dissertation.
- You will be guided to critically assess academic literature in your own unique way.
- Abstrahere prompts will guide you to summarize the essential ideas in the academic texts you have selected to read.
- Your Abstrahere Critical Reading Box summaries will better prepare you to select text from academic literature for inclusion in your dissertation.
- Optional prompts guide you how to manage your own Abstrahere Critical Reading box summaries.
- You can communicate directly on line with your dissertation supervisor about your Critical Reading Box summaries.
Al documents uploaded on Abstrahere Academic must be in Pdf format. Please remember to activate your Inetkey for on-campus internet access, and to use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome as your web browser (please do not use Internet Explorer because specific Pdf plug-in technical issues are related to Internet Explorer)
Background information on this application is available at http://abstrahere.warpdemo.co.za/. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on this application. Please send your feedback to hjb@sun.ac.za.
