Writing Across the Curriculum

The problem is this: We can spend endless time thinking and wind up doing nothing-or, worse, getting involved in the minutiae of a partially baked idea and believing that pursuing it is the same as making progress on the original idea.

The basic mechanism is simple: The group meets once a week. On the weeks that it is your turn to present, you (and only you) circulate your writing to the other members of your group, 48 hours before your scheduled meeting. The other members then read the draft and make written comments. When the members meet, those comments are shared and the piece is discussed in toto.

Through collaboration between the Thompson Writing Program and the university's office of alumni affairs, the Duke Reader Project offers our faculty members a way to supplement their own responses to their students' writing. When professors include their courses in the project, their students can get comments on drafts of papers from an alumnus or employee who has relevant experience in the field, like the Coast Guard commander or the wildlife expert.

Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren't as good at it as we should be. 10 tips for good writing-this time for academics, not students.

describes the rhetorical and 21st century skills as well as habits of mind and experiences that are critical for college success.

This Princeton English professor has written more than 3,200 short essays on Facebook and shared them with his students.

This project seeks to explore how "Reacting" might be employed as an alternative approach to fulfill the broader objectives of a liberal arts education.  The success of the "Reacting" pedagogy in engaging undergraduate students has been confirmed by faculty reports, student evaluations and formal double-blind assessment studies (Stroessner, 2009).  The latter studies show that "Reacting" students, when compared with those enrolled in other general education courses, improved in certain salient categories associated with learning, including the development of an appreciation of multiple points of view on controversial topics and a belief in the malleability of human characteristics over time and across contexts.  Speaking skills also improved substantially.

WAC has become more timely and valuable within participatory Web 2.0 environments. This presentation highlightsinnovative teaching examples from UIUC that engage students within Web 2.0 by applying WAC principles:

Hints, tips, suggestions, pointers and prompts from faculty for faculty...

a pedagogical movement that began in the 1980s. Generally, writing across the curriculum programs share the philosophy that writing instruction should happen across the academic community and throughout a student's undergraduate education. Writing across the curriculum programs also value writing as a method of learning. Finally, writing across the curriculum acknowledges the differences in writing conventions across the disciplines, and believes that students can best learn to write in their areas by practicing those discipline-specific writing conventions.

I have developed some thoughts that might help everyone become a bit better at discouraging, recognizing, and responding to plagiarism.

This guide provides useful, practical advice to students on how to use and acknowledge sources of information.

This section contains information on the onsite and online training provided by PlagiarismAdvice.org along with details of some of the commissioned advice projects we have been involved in.

E-portfolio efforts at Stanford have focused on capturing and documenting students' learning and engaging in reflection, rationale building, or planning, contributing to a culture of folio thinking. In fall 2010, Stanford initiated a pilot introducing e-portfolios to assist with the advising of students in their first two years prior to declaring a major, to learn from students and advisors how e-portfolios and folio thinking can enhance their face-to-face interactions. The pilot will explore the possibility that persistence can be improved through the active involvement of others (mentors, alumni, family, peers) in the lives of students as facilitated through the medium of e-portfolios.

Shelly Blake-Plock

according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist & professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference, "The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective."

In the context of your higher education programme, reflective writing will usually have a purpose (e.g. you will be writing reflectively about something that you have to do or have done). It will usually involve the sorting out of bits of knowledge, ideas, feelings, awareness of how you are behaving and so on. It could be seen as a melting pot into which you put a number of thoughts, feelings, other forms of awareness, and perhaps new information. In the process of sorting it out in your head, and representing the sortings out on paper, you may either recognise that you have learnt something new or that you need to reflect more with, perhaps further input. Your reflections need to come to some sort of end point, even if that is a statement of what you need to consider next.