News

General News

We monitor newspapers and websites for news we think might be of general interest. This service is brought to you courtesy of our Virtual Campus.

Also check out our events page on which we are able to bring you regularly updated details of meetings, book or product launches. Visitors to the site can add details of their own events.

News about the Rune School Site

As of: Wednesday, 18-Jan-2006 06:11:13 EST

Rune School Mail Problem

As of mid January 2006 we have been experiencing major problems with our email delivery. Though we appear to have fixed these we now have a backlog of many thousand mails to read through! Please be patient if you have written to the School and are awaiting a response.

Fourth Birthday - Plans for the Future

The 3rd April 2005 being the 4th Birthday of the School, the Director took this opportunity to outline some of the plans ahead for the coming year:

• A completely new version of the Virtual Campus will be coming out by the end of the year integrating a MySQL backend and hopefully a new chatroom. We have learned a lot about coding since we wrote the first set of programs and the revised version should be faster and easier to maintain.
• Work will continue on better integrating the Virtual Campus and the main website
• We will be launching a supporters organisation to enable those who support the aims of the School to make a more direct contribution, both through membership fees to the organisation and fundraising activity the organisation will be undertaking
• Development work will continue on the Foundation Course to produce further new modules. Two are now available and we hope this will be at least five by the end of 2005. A great deal of work has gone into producing something different in this new course and we consider it will be excellent value for money.
• The School has been working on developing on-line examinations and the first of these "Norse Mythology and the Eddas" will soon be available.
• Work has been undertaken improving the School's logo and a new version will appear on the site in the coming months. This will coincide with a campaign to raise the School's profile and a complete redesign of the existing website.
• We are working on the development of a specialist search facility (www.runesearch.com) which we hope will be up and working by Fall 2005.

Virtual Campus Launches

The Rune School is proud to launch its Virtual Campus which has been developed to aid communication between staff and students. The Director described it as "a major advance in the facilities offered to students".

Website Changes and Bug Fixes

BIGGER, BRIGHTER, BETTER!

We will be adding a number of new sections to the website in the next few months and in order to do this we have reorganised the website since some areas, such as the root directory, were becoming very cluttered with files. We are doing our utmost to ensure that the restructuring does not affect live material however please show tolerance if you experience problems and please, please notify us.

An immediate change you should see is the website becoming more colorful and visually attractive. Our use of color will remain restrained, but there will be more. We have always held back previously because much of our material is designed to print out and not all colored text is easily reproducible or legible by those without color printers. A rewriting of our printer-friendly code (actually starting from scratch and writing it in a different coding language) and the introduction of CSS on the site have made this much easier to deal with.

See this page for regularly updated reports of problems with the site and recently made corrections

Revised Course - Coming Soon

Due to the fact that now both Bernard King and Freya Aswynn's books are out of print it has been decided to revise the free INTRO-01 Rune course. We will no longer be accepting registrations for this course UNLESS you already have the course books. Please don't ask us to help you find them, we have done magnificently up till now in tracking down copies, but it is a drain on our time we cannot afford. Freya Aswynn has very kindly permitted us to use some of the material from her book on the course and we are presently looking for other possible course books. Expect a new version of the course within the next two months.

Rune School Moves Site!

The School has moved its website to new dedicated Linux servers based in the USA. While this move was planned some time ago, it was abruptly brought forward when we lost all confidence in our UK based hosting company. There have been many problems over the last year and we considered this move offered the best opportunity for stability and future development.

Printer Friendly Pages at Rune School

In response to popular demand, printer friendly pages have now come to the Rune School. We recognise that our page design, while fine on screen, is not necessarily the best for minimising paper use when it comes to print outs. Hence on all our Topics and Lessons pages, plus a few others we think people may want a permanent copy of, you will now find a "Printer Friendly" button like this one:

Simply click on it in order to convert the page to a format ideal for printing out. Then print as normal using your browser.

Student Registrations Exceed Target

The School is delighted to report that its free introductory rune course has received a very positive response and the year's target for students has been met and exceeded in the first month! The School has 12 students who have purchased the course books and begun studying and more than twice that who have registered and will begin the course when they have all the materials.

School staff are overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response.

Top Rune Website Praises Rune School

The CBSunny (Alphabet of Mystery) website, one of the best known and most respected of rune websites has given its endorsement to the Rune School and its free introductory rune course, describing it as an "outstanding effort" and listing it at the top of its Rune Hot Links - The Best page.

Rune School webmaster, OS commented that "This is an unexpected and very welcome occurence which does wonders for the credibility of the School and I am sure will make it much easier for other webmasters to take us seriously when we contact them with regard to using pages from their sites in our courses".

Rune School Launched

The Rune School website officially launched on 3 April 2001 very quietly. There was not even a celebratory glass of champagne after the 5 months of work that was spent into putting it together. We have been very pleased by the take up of our free introductory rune course and in response to demand we are now working on a fully assessed version of the course for which there will be a small fee to cover examinations and marking of coursework. Keep watching this space for more news.

We are currently developing a number of other CGI programs to add to those already on the Lessons page to aid in the learning and recognition of rune names/glyphs. There are also plans to establish our own web-ring.