Greetings from Vaasa! April 3, 2008
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Teaching, Travel.trackback
I am in Finland at the moment giving a couple of guest lectures at The University of Vaasa at The Department of Communication Studies. Today I taught the “Advanced Course in Multimedia Communication” and tomorrow I will be giving a lecture on the course “Text and Discourse Analysis - Practice”.
Both the lectures deal with my research on Arto (which is actually a boy’s name in Finland 
) and the theories and methods of discourse studies that I am using.
The Finnish counterpart of Arto is the social network site IRC-Galleria and it is interesting to hear how the history of that site seems to be similar to Arto - especially when it comes to the moral panic and the stories presented in the news media. Also, it seems that the Finnish youngsters are using IRC-Galleria in the same way that the Danish teenagers are using Arto - only the average age on IRC-Galleria is about 20 years old, which is a little older than the average Arto user.
By the way, Facebook is of course also really huge in Finland. All the students I taught today had Facebook profiles.
The view from the University of Vaasa - nice, with ice on top of the water.
Hey Malene,
I’ve been reading some articles on your blog here and there. I found that one by chance and the funny thing is I have studied myself a year in the University of Vaasa.
Vaasa is such a great place to live in. A wonderful little city full of very interesting people to meet. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay as much as I did back then.
-Mal from Reykjavik
Hi Mal,
Ah interesting
I was only in Vaasa a couple of days, but I agree with you that it is a charming little city. I met some nice people as well.
Take care,
Malene