Issue number one hundred and fifty-six (December 2013) from the WorldU3A Service, sent on the first of every month to U3A members anywhere in the world.

Feel free to copy any or all of this information in your newsletters.
 Please send items of possible interest to the editor, Tom Holloway.

Sixty is the new 45, 80 is the new 60, and 100 is … well, really old. But even centenarians know that once you stop learning, you start dying, to quote Albert Einstein. Here at http://www.onlinecolleges.net/ are 10 trends involving senior citizens and education that remind us you’re only as old as you feel. More details here >>> (Thank you, Dr. Vyasamoorthy).

Compton Verney Art Gallery and Activity Centre - Warwickshire

Curious Beasts: Animal Prints from the British Museum - Until 15 December. Explore the animal world through beautiful and bizarre imagery found in prints of the 15th to the early 19th centuries. Featuring prints by Albrecht Dürer, Francisco de Goya and George Stubbs. Find out more. >>>

Pop-up printmakers studio
Tuesdays and Sundays until 15 December
Find out first-hand about printmaking in our pop-up studio. See the tools which are used, learn about printmaking techniques and meet our artist-in-residence Kate Da’Casto from Leicester Print Workshop. She will be in the studio every Tuesday and Saturday demonstrating the printmaking processes on a working press. Find out more >>>


Philosophy Groups: A fascinating website, highly polemical, but well worth study. In the opinion of this editor, the 'Friesian manifesto' alone merits reprinting and discussion, as may be concluded from the following....

"The essays at this site, addressing many philosophical, historical, scientific, religious, economic, legal, and political issues, range from the fully annotated and technical to more informal and discursive discussions, often originally written for undergraduate classes. Many items therefore should be intelligible to those not familiar with all the arcana of academic philosophy, or with academic philosophy at all. This is done deliberately, since the trend, by which philosophy has become obscure and esoteric and mostly dropped out of popular and literate culture, should be resisted".

All users: Adblock Plus is a freeware program which blocks advertisements when viewing websites, even BBCNews and YOUTUBE. It may be added to a browser (Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome) as an 'extension'. (Thank you Rona Brightwell).

Sci/Tech Groups: Started in 1995 as a service for US Schools, ScienceDaily has grown to be a news service with roughly 2,000 contributing organizations worldwide, partnerships with major content providers, and technical support services. There are plenty of clear explanations and a wide range of down-loadable video-clips.
Online Learning: The Concord Consortium provide free digital resources for teaching science, maths and engineering.

"We first recognized the educational possibilities of networked computing back in the very earliest days of the Web. It's still going strong a decade later, both here and in over thirty countries worldwide. Meanwhile, we've been working consistently to bring you the best innovations possible in online learning.

"Our work includes helpful resources for you such as books and publications about online learning, online professional development courses in mathematics, new ways to connect online learning and interactive resources

"To help you get started in online teaching or hone your skills, we offer a periodic course to help you design and teach online courses. To keep up on the latest with this and other developments, subscribe to receive our updates".
    Welcome to the WorldU3A Virtual Forum
The Forum meets online on the first Sunday of every month, starting at 9am UK time (7pm Brisbane time), using the flashmeeting/tele-conference facilities of the UK Open University hosted by the University of East Anglia. To take part you will need mic/speakers and a webcam. To begin with meetings will be limited to only 10 participants, but we hope to extend this soon. Go to www.u3aforum.org or click here to learn more >>>
"Since 2008, Academic Earth has worked to compile an ever-growing collection of online college courses, made available free of charge, from some of the most respected universities. We proudly build on the precedent set forth by MIT OpenCourseware, believing that everyone deserves access to a world-class education.

"To facilitate this goal, we have links to over 750 online courses and 8,500 individual online lectures, giving students of all ages unparalleled access to college courses they may otherwise never experience. Whether supplementing existing coursework, or learning for the sake of learning, anyone with an internet connection has the freedom to learn at their own pace from world-renowned experts, without the burden of rising tuition costs".


U3A Online: A complete GEMs Archive - Rick Swindell's newsletter - pdf printouts of all prior editions can be found at www.u3aonline.org.au

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