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About the UiB Collaboratory

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The complexity and interconnectedness of today’s social, economic and environmental challenges call for radical innovation in research, higher education, and governance. In all three areas, there is a need for new types of knowledge, tools, and experience that makes it possible to make sense of and act in a world undergoing rapid transformation. Meeting these challenges, the Collaboratory’s ambition is to bring students, researchers, and practitioners together in innovative, interdisciplinary and problem-oriented forms of education, research and outreach activities. Through this approach to higher education, a broad international network and, not the least, the solid grounding in and contribution to existing activities at the University of Bergen, the Collaboratory is well placed to contribute to the UiB strategy for 2016 – 2020.

Through experimentation and R&D-based innovation in student involvement and teaching methods, the Collaboratory aims to put its ambitions into practice by initiating workshops, courses, research projects, journals, and conferences – all with students in the driver’s seat.

The first formalization of the Collaboratory’s vision was Bergen International Student Conference 2018 – an academic conference by and for university students. In October 2017 two UiB students were hired part-time as conference coordinators, and together with a reference group from CET and a team of highly committed student volunteers, they dedicated themselves for six months to bring about a two-day conference in early April 2018 on the theme “Climate and Society: Transformations in the 21st Century”. With almost one hundred speakers and participants from all over the world, BISC was a huge success, and it was immediately followed by the decision for this to be an annual event.

BISC 2019, and other projects such as workshops and student-led credit courses, are currently in the development phase, so stay tuned for more information later this fall.

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