News

As usual, the Graduation Ceremony took place on Iceland's National Day, 17th of June - which is the birth date of independense leader Jón Sigurðsson - as part of the celebrations at Hrafnseyri which is the birth place of Jón. This year's cohort was unprecedentelly large, receiving their certificates from the rector of UNAK and the UW graduate caps which are knitted hats with tassles, as a nod to the traditional Icelandic tail-cap.

A symposium in relations to Give Icelandic a Chance took place on Thursday, with a following workshop on Friday. The symposium was titled "How can a community support language acquisition?" and several speakers gave very interesting talks, which goes to show quite an ambition for teaching Icelandic to foreigners so that the language can be of proper use to them and make Icelandic society more accessible.

The course From extraction to attraction: Coastal communities in an era of leisure and tourism, which Patrick Maher teaches, finished last week. At the end of the course students made videos highlighting their perspective on Ísafjörður and its surroundings and the results are these three fun short films:

The Give Icelandic a Chance campaign continues into the summer and some very interesting events are lined up over the next few weeks, as can be seen on the poster here on the right.

The Annual General Meeting of University Centre of the Westfjords was held on Friday 5th of May. Apart from traditional objectives of the Annual Meeting, a new board was elected as well as chair of the representitives' council. Very few changes were made, Dóra Hlín Gísladóttir was re-elected as chair of the council and the UW board remains the same except for a new secretary, as Stefán B. Sigurðsson left the board and Martha Lilja Martensdóttir was voted in to replace him.

Canada's Ambassador to Iceland, Jeannette Menzies, visited the University Centre of the Westfjords today and spoke to both staff and students about continuing, and possibly increasing, collaboration with Canadian institutes. The weather in Ísafjörður was really welcoming so the ambassador joined the students of From Extraction to Attraction: Coastal Communities in an Era of Leisure and Tourism on a walk around town.

The new Grimsson Fellowship is now open for applications, until 1 July. The Fellowship is a collaboration between the University of Iceland, University of Akureyri, Reykjavík University, the University Center of the Westfjords and the biotechnology company Kerecis, which originates in Ísafjörður.

A group of UW students is travelling to Latvia and Lithuania to take part in a two week Nordplus course on de-populating smaller regions. The course is a 5 ECST international course where students focus on development of regions around the Baltic Sea.

The remaining, modules for the new Students Housing buildings arrived at the harbour yesterday. The new buildings are prefabricated from construction company Seve in Estonia from where the flock of builders also came from earlier this month.

Students on the course Pollution in the Coastal Arctic had a beach clean up on the First Day of Summer last week, not the least to celebrate Earth Day which was on 22 April. The clean up was a collaboration with students from MÍ College; UW students organised the day and the college students participated in the project, hand in results at MÍ and get their work evaluated there.