August 2006

Welcome back. We hope you have also been able to take a welcome summer break and are thoroughly refreshed and ready to take on new challenges.
There are some new challenges for us this month. We are busy putting a whole range of new courses online for the new term. You can sign up for these starting in September. We have also been redecorating and remodelling the place and you will see a new fresher, cleaner face on our website which we hope you will find easier to navigate and more pleasant to study in.

This week, we noticed an interesting article in the Guardian Why college cuts are bad news by Anna Ford, famous in the UK as a newsreader. Her article titlegives an idea of her stance as regards adult education. She makes a number of points, all relevant to the world in which the New Curiosity Shop operates and tries to bring genuine education to the Internet.

The very small budget that has funded community learning in UK colleges has been axed and redirected to other things. This cuts out an essential part of the social glue in communities served by our colleges, dispersing groups of students who used to dip into a wide range of subjects supported by meeting up with old friends and making new ones. At the same time a huge part of the education budget goes into tooling up schools and colleges with new IT hardware.

Unfortunately it is usually left to the lecturers and teachers to find the content that can be delivered on these systems, without extra resources to help them do this. Anna Ford points out the similarities between her old job in the media and her new role in educational technology and sees a need to bring back education, information and entertainment in both spheres. A goal that we wholeheartedly support in the New Curiosity Shop.

So welcome back for a new session. We hope we can get a chance to educate, inform and entertain you in the coming months.

Mark Toner.

 

 

 

Paul's Puzzle

We have a winner for June/July's Paul's Puzzle. He is Dick Beets from South Africa, and his prize was a voucher for 25% off the course of his choice. Well done Dick. Paul will be reappearing next month with his next puzzle.

Astroflash

Our Astronomy staff are hard at work reviewing courses in the wake of International Astronomical Union Resolution 5A (2006). Poor old Pluto has been demoted and our solar system now has only eight planets. So the planet lessons need to be checked for extra bodies.

The good news is that we have lowered the entry requirements for our Astronomy classes. Now candidates only have to count to eight rather than nine as before. If you want to learn more about this shocking news, have a look at the IAU’s own web page here: http://www.iau2006.org/mirror/www.iau.org/iau0603/index.html.

Further review of Astronomy courses will follow later as there is now a new kind of object for students to learn about. Pluto and two other solar system bodies, Ceres (the largest asteroid between Mars and Jupiter) and 2003 UB313 (an object orbiting farther out than Pluto) have now been designated dwarf planets (Resolution 6A).

The Disney organisation have followed suit and demoted their Pluto from star billing to sidekick.