Podcast: Participation, Motivation and Adult Learning by Dr Ellen Boeren

This is a podcast of Dr Ellen Boeren’s presentation ‘Participation, Motivation and Adult Learning’.  Dr Ellen Boeren is Chancellor’s Fellow (tenure track) at Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom). She got her PhD in Educational Sciences in May 2011 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. On the 10th of July 2014, she gave a talk in a Ragged University event which was called “Participation, motivation and adult learning: similarities and differences across Europe”.  You can listen to the podcast here. Read more…

Binaries, Young Carers and The Barriers to Accessing Higher Education

This is about the barriers to higher education young carers face… “I would like to send a message to staff, teachers and tutors – all young adult carers need help. Some staff need to respect the fact that when we leave college or school at the end of the day, we don’t go home and go out with friends, we go home and take care of someone until they are in bed. It’s a hard job but it’s the best job ever.” Leanne: Voices of young adult carers.

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Podcast: Psychiatry; A Woman’s Account of Being Sectioned

Here is an interview with a woman who recounts her experience of being sectioned by her husband. It is intimate and she talks about all the details of how it came about, what it made her feel and what she thinks retrospectively of the experience. She went on to become qualified in the field of psychology and so it presents a particularly interesting perspective on psychiatry.
The way that women encounter the world is significantly undermined in many ways.  We need only take a look at the difference in the levels of payment women get for equivalent jobs with their male counterparts.  This oral history represents a signifier into the gender differentials which can exist around voice and agency.  We know from records that in the past single women who had children out of wedlock – also illegitimate children – were often interred in mental asylums for the ‘social inconvenience’ they suggested to the dominant paradigm. Read more…

The Corporate Takeover of Education

We are living in an age where increasingly the lifeworld we inherently own and share are becoming colonized with the values of the marketplace.  In short, everything is being bought and sold from under our feet and out of our lives.  This is a distinct and troubling trend where the idea of economic growth is metastasizing into a financialism which consumes everything in its wake.

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Emergency Linux Migration Guide by Paul Whitaker

This guide is meant to ease the process of transitioning from Windows to Linux, but it is meant to be an overview of the whole process rather than a detailed step-by-step (when you know where to look, which you soon will, the step-by-step stuff is all very well documented any way, so that’s not a problem).
Why you need to escape from Windows
Almost all major computer security problems, from high end milspec cyber weapons like StuxNet to Gameover/Zeus depend entirely on the absence of substantial security features in Microsoft products. Windows is a house built on the sand of the old DOS operating system which was perfectly fit for purpose back when a PC consisted of two floppy disks and a monitor. Read more…

Appeal From The Littoral Zone By Julia Barton

Littoral: the zone between the low and high tide marks”

I am a member of Ragged University, an artist, and activist I have spent the last 18 months cataloguing the litter on 18 beaches along the NW coast of Scotland, as part of Littoral Art Project which I set up 2 years ago to investigate and draw attention to draw attention to the volume, nature and effects of beach litter. Read more…