Digital Academic Writing Support

Abstract

At the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway, the library is given the coordinator responsibility for a project involving faculties, first-year-support, Department of Education and student administrative support. The project aims at making it easy to embed information literacy and academic writing into the curriculum.

• Develop a digital tool box where academics will find and share teaching activities
• Harvest experiences and suggest models for physic and digital writing support
• Suggest competence building measures for teachers and guides of academic writing

Academic writing and critical dealing with sources are central skills that students are expected to master after graduating from university. At the same time these are generic skills which need practice, discussion and reflection. However, we know that this part of students' learning is easily neglected in competition with subject teaching.

What we have done: The library has established the project in collaboration with two pilot subjects (biology and geography), emphasising digital writing support according to the UiB’s strategic aims and action plans. The two pilot subjects recognise the importance of writing for critical thinking and development of subject knowledge. They will redesign courses in their BA programmes to better align learning outcomes and assessment with learning activities, e.g. writing including peer and teacher feedback.

By the time of the conference in June, we will have drafted a framework for typical writing support in the pilots to use for their teaching in the autumn semester.

In our presentation we will address these key questions:

• How does our institution support academic writing?
• How do we train the trainers?
• How do we provide integrated teaching of academic writing and IL?