At Jennis place

Every Socrates Erazmus student has totor. I do not really have a lot from main, but Jenni, tutor from Staša adopted me. This weekend she invited us to her home. She is living in the small city 50 kilometers from Vaasa in nice house. She and her family were really nice with us!!! After long time we were eating home made food again. We were driving with snowmobile, having sauna, sangria party and than we went out to really nice night club, with more floors and music for all tastes. I liked room with Finnish music the most, because it was really different ambient. Everybody were dancing on the tables.

Next day we were shopping and having and in the evening went home to catch Saturday party! It was really nice weekend. Thank you Jenni!!!

pictures from helsinki

Helsinki...

Yesterday in the evening we arrived from 4- days long trip, from capital of Finland, Helsinki. The city is the country's nerve center for business, finance, fashion, medicine, entertainment, media and culture. There is a large and varied collection of museums, galleries and performance spaces. We visited Helsinki cathedral (probably the most prominent building in the city, and its symbol), the Uspenski Orthodox cathedral, museum of photography, underground church,…On sunny Sunday we visited island near Helsinki: island Suomenlinna. Romantic, quiet, different place really relax you.

Saturday night we had party in expensive but really nice 2-flors discotheque LUX in the city center. Because of long waiting in the line (almost 1 hour) we did not feel our legs but it was worthy. I was not is such big and nice discotheque before.

We were staying in Hostel Stadion. It is nice hostel for 16 Euro per night.

Trip was great. Next station: Lapland in 16^th of March.

party time...

Important part of student life are parties. We already know where is the best place to go in each day of the week. On Tuesdays Olivers Inn, on Wednesdays Fontana, on Fridays Gigli Marlin (but I don’t like this place), on Saturdays Royal or Fontana, where we have free entry till midnight. Sundays are the best for sauna parties. :)

Yesterday was Superstereo because of the concert of the group FISH YOUR PLUMBER! The group counts six members: Yulia, Nadine, Thibaut, Andras, Aki & Daniel. Four of them are international students. It was really great concert, with a lot of people. Congratulations to the group!

where can you find me...

It is already month and a half since I arrived to this small, romantic city on the west coast of Finland. The city is bilingual with 71.5% of the population speaking Finnish as their first language and 24.9% speaking Swedish. The city is an important centre for Finland-Swedish culture.

Till now this was my best month ever.

I am living at Tekla 2, in the apartment 216 with my best friend Staša. It is nice because living in really relaxed, funny and never boring.

It takes us 15 minutes to get to the University and 20 minutes to the city center by feet. But since we have bikes traveling around city is much faster.

INTRODUCTION TO STUDYING MULTIMEDIA AUTHORING SYSTEM

In this course we had some online classes, also classes in the classroom. This page is a result of this course.

LEARNING IN NETWORKS

That is my first online course. We are learning about online learning, how is it working, how can students collaborate on net, what kind of learning on net exist,….

Course literature:

Aggarwal, Anil (2003). Web-based Education: Learning from Experience. Idea Group Inc. Available as an e-book.

Chapter X (9 pages); Chapter XIII (19 pages)

Research papers (about 15-30 pages) distributed by the teacher.

MULTIMEDIA TOOLS

I don’t really love this subject because of the schedule. J We have classes on Saturdays from 8 a.m. till 4 p.m. Programs we are working with:

• PowerPoint 2003, for multimedia
• Audacity, for sound editing
• Adobe Photoshop 7, for image editing
• Macromedia Flash 5, for interactive hypermedia
• Windows Movie Maker, for video editing.

I have already meet most of these programmes in Slovenia, but I still getting a lot of new information how to used them.

Current Issues in Communication Studies: Perspectives on Democracy and Citizenship

Multidisciplinary Current issues -course aims to give an overview of Finnish communication studies on democracy and citizenship. I like this course a lot. Literature is great and interesting, also the way of learning is something different for me. It is also online course, but here students and professors don’t know each other. We are from Universities all over the Finland.

Each we are required to do different activities, usually based on at least one of the provided articles. Weekly discussions on forums and learning diaries. Also learning diaries are something new for me.

SURVIVAL RUSSIAN

I took this course because on april I am going to excursion St. Petersburg with University and I always find Russia as really special and interesting country. Till now we had just one class, but it is great! Teacher is symphatic Russian guy who is really trying to learn us something.

In firs course we met Russian alafabet. They have some special letters. But now, when I know how to read, I understand a lot of word because some of them are similar with Slovenian or Croatian words.

SURVIVAL FINNISH

I am taking this course at Polytechnik University. This is our last week. I am happy because because it was pretty boring. And I can tell you: Finnish it is not really easy language to learn!

University of Vaasa

It has four faculties: Business Studies, Humanities, Public Administration and Technology. The university has 425 personnel from which teaching staff 180 and professors 44. Around 5000 students are currently studying in various degree programs at the university. I am studying special program for foreign students: Multimedia authoring system. I am also having some other subject.

My subjects are:

• Learning in networks
• Introduction to Electronic publishing
• Introduction to Studying Multimedia Authoring Systems
• Multimedia Tools
• Projects
• Current Issues in Communication Studies: Perspectives on Democracy and Citizenship
• Survival Finnish
• Survival Russian