#positive: for first attempt at an actual moving picture without much specific education; not bad

[spotsupstuff]

day 16

without plants and equipment's skill issue version below:

[sumi123332-blog]

best bug out bag backpack

Asking individuals the prepping culture an easy question for example "What's the best survival way of prepping? Bunkering, Homesteading, Backwoods Survival or any other" will generate a lot of discussions and much more very intense and well considered replies and arguments. Many people will answer this very rapidly based by themselves opinion or position in existence, that is realistically the easiest method to answer the issue. For individuals people within the "business" of prepping we very often need to take one step back and check out the large picture. This really is hard for a lot of us because a year many years of some time and huge amounts of sources accumulating our very own preps and understanding based by ourselves opinions and situations.

Rather let us attempt to view this from the prism of the person A new comer to the prepping movement. You aren't no discernible skills with no stored foods or products. The brand new prepper feels something bad will probably take place in the "next couple of years". For more information on the best bug out bag, visit our website today!

Bunkering

You may still find a lot of individuals which are buying bunkers and building hidey holes to leap into when the shit hits the fan. A few of these bunkers are perfect for tornados survival but living lengthy term inside a bunker is fraught with issues. Pointless to state I'm a firm believer that bunker prepping is really a temporary means to fix a potentially lengthy term problem. The finish outcome is that preppers diving into bunkers might be properly protected from initial problems inside a SHTF event, but might easily end up behind the 8-ball inside a lengthy term event when their ability systems start to fail, their stored foods go out, their water runs dry and they start to suffer from a few of the many mental affects of bunker existence.

Backwoods Survival

That one is difficult to discount because individuals have survived in "nature" because the beginning of individual and then achieve this in lots of parts around the globe. The abilities involved with proper backwoods survival are first rate and clearly supply the Backwoods Survival Expert using the tools and know-how you can love years from the land.

My greatest argument about Backwoods Survival/Bushcraft is the fact that I do not personally believe that it is by itself a "prepping" methodology. I have faith that backwoods survival is an extremely broad skills and expertise that preppers must have some understanding and experience of in accordance with their specific atmosphere. Personally, i think that fundamental essentials skills that should be known as upon in the on-group of SHTF, or after a celebration by which your preps have grown to be unusable or lost for you. A few of these skills for example tracking, trapping, hunting, fishing etc may be used in parallel along with other prepping methodologies to improve survivability.

The undoing of Backwoods Survival like a prepping methodology may be the impossibility of living from the land having a family with you. As time grinds around the family will need to move to be able to secure the sources which are needed. Movement itself brings natural risk but mainly it can make existence very difficult when you're gradually roaming from space to space to be able to provide enough nutrition for the family.

Again, I do think there's GREAT value within the backwoods survival / bushcraft skills. I merely don't think that individuals a new comer to the prepping movement ought to be searching for this area like a complete prepping solution. Want to obtain the solvent trap suppressor kit at the best prices and top quality? Visit our website.

Exactly what are we speaking about?

When we were to accept base question: "What's the best survival way of prepping?" and put it poor a SHTF event which will last years otherwise decades the image will begin to become a bit more obvious. Bunkering and Bushcraft aren't likely contenders for brand new preppers when viewing the issue from a lengthy term position. After you have established you're prepping for any lengthy term event your available prepping options narrow.

"Maritime" Prepping

As recently there's been a little bit of discuss bugging on motorboats or perhaps living at ocean for lengthy periods at any given time. I've no difficulties with utilizing a boat like a bug out vehicle. I have faith that it's a good idea if correctly utilized in your bug out plan. I don't believe people should plan a ship to their bug out plans a lot as determine that utilizing a boat to bug out is much more achievable according to their unique circumstances. If you live near a sizable lake as well as your bug out plans will give you across large stretches of this water, then yes, an insect out boat would suit you. However, if you reside 200 miles from the closest large lake and also you plan your bug out to employ a boat because you want to make use of your boat, you should re-think your plan.

Living at ocean or sailing open waters for lengthy periods is really a different animal altogether. The understanding and skills and equipment necessary to achieve this are vast and never easily accrued. For those who have zero sailing experience today, and you're attempting to prep to have an event that you simply feel might happen soon, this really is most likely and not the route you need to travel together with your prepping plans. If you have twenty years of open water experience along with a $4 million boat filled with equipment particularly made to survive lengthy term at ocean and also the many years of understanding needed to help keep all individuals systems running and repair them once they fail (that they will) along with the understanding and experience to captain that vessel across vast stretches of open water... well then you're most likely not studying this short article.

Once more this information is for brand new preppers. I simply aren't seeing the need for the lengthy term open water boating solution without many years of lead some time and huge amounts of sources.

Homesteading

This brings mean towards the last category that These are merely within the opening question. Inside a publish SHTF situation the only best prepared person on the planet is the one which can live from the land by growing food and raising animals. Yes, there are lots of other difficulties for example shelter, small equipment repair or manufacturing, security, governance, medical assistance, sanitation, etc. Other great tales and so on. However, should you increase your own food you are able to take care of your own existence and also have a viable way of trade. Should you raise animals you'll have more food available in addition to goods for example made of woll, felt, skins, hair, etc. Animals produces manure also is a trade good. Apples, pears, peaches, cherries, berries, honey, milk... their email list isn't-ending. All this could be grown and elevated on the farm sufficiently small for just a few individuals to keep it in check, with sufficient left for small quantities of trade for other activities.

Although it might take many years to learn to make a high yield of crops and a lot of animals the rudimentary skills are pretty straight forward enough that even individuals with hardly any understanding and experience can grow enough to sustain existence. This may also be supplemented with hunting and fishing where available. Homesteaders also provide the benefit of open space for movement and growth, root cellars for storage and canning and preserving for lengthy term food stores.

Conclusion

This is actually the very lower argument. In bunkering you're producing nothing as well as your finite supplies will definitely go out. Whenever you emerge from your hole you stand the serious probability of emerging in a severe disadvantage. The truly amazing expense of a big bunker with extended survivability has run out of achieve on most people to begin with.

The backwoods survival expert can survive by himself. He is able to provide products for do business with locals and live a good existence probably. Introduce a household into that situation and things change rapidly.

The captain from the SS BugOut is going to do well and survive as lengthy as his equipment is constantly on the function and it is maintained. Eventually time will get caught up and also the equipment will fail and parts is going to be unavailable and there won't be any more mats to make the various components. The captain is condemned to depend on outdoors sources for survival in certain respects.

The homesteaders can survive, and also have done this for generations. There's without doubt why an upswing of mankind adopted so carefully using the understanding and technologies of medium and small scale farming. Read your history books and you will notice that farms and grist mills grew to become the backbone of communities that later progressed into towns and metropolitan areas. The number of bunkers have grown to be a town? The number of motorboats have grown to be a residential area?

Before anybody jumps in and states "wait another, homesteading is not easy!" You're correct, if however the SHTF event occurs six several weeks from now, is the bunker stocked and prepared? Have you got the understanding and experience to reside in the backwoods? Is the boat outfitted and therefore are you correctly educated to survive open waters lengthy term? With regard of beginning up or being able to survive, my cash is around the homesteader every day.

Within the main issue, lengthy term, sources, trade and community are what's going to drive survival. The suggestions above pointed out ways of prepping is useful for short duration. Many will work longer when the person has got the proper understanding and equipment. Only homesteading could be contacted with the little training and understanding as well as provide a lot in exchange.

[notesonresearch]

Thoughts on the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework

On 22nd of June 2017, the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) results were released. While this immediately led to celebratory noises from the various ‘winners’, the prominent ‘losers’ tended to call into question the validity of the ranking as unreflective of actual teaching quality. I want to talk about this response and the context that surrounds TEF, and how my own thinking about it (and metrics in general) differs somewhat from this ‘accurate vs. inaccurate’ characterisation of TEF.

Firstly, TEF is of course complex. Wonkhe has a good summary of the TEF mechanism, but I’ll give a short version here. TEF is a UK government-run assessment scheme for rating the ‘quality’ of ‘teaching’ (I use both words advisedly). It requires UK universities submit justifying evidence alongside various metrics (e.g., National Student Survey results, student employment data, etc.). The TEF process then sorts participating universities into ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ or ‘Bronze’ categories. These categories are then tied to fees that universities may charge students (although this mechanism is not in place yet). TEF is also conceptually connected to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is the UK’s national evaluation of research output conducted every 4–5 years (last time 2014). REF, being older, is far more involved than TEF, relying on a significant number of ‘peer review’ panels (using that term advisedly too) to inspect selected research output from all UK institutions in order to then rank them (which is then tied to core funding distribution).

Three points to note first:

1. I don’t think my observations below are particularly original or surprising.

2. I am no expert in politics or the history of government relationship to universities or in university governance.

3. It should go without saying but quite obviously I do indeed think universities should strive to be excellent in teaching. Just not in this way.

Trend and ideology

TEF is the latest way that successive governments in the UK have sought to introduce (or impose, depending on your point of view) market dynamics on the university sector. Broadly this reflects the advance of something that looks a bit like scientific management. I believe TEF is traceable to longer term trends of ‘new public management’ and managerialism that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to reshape the public sector, particularly through the application of metricisation, performance monitoring, and introduction of competition mechanisms. Even more broadly, if could be said that TEF is reflective of the logic of neoliberalism that has been adopted (or at least tolerated) by all recent UK governments as a model for most shaping sectors of society: i.e., privatisation, financialisation, deregulation, etc. I say this more as a matter of fact than a suggestion of right or wrong. The core question is the relevance of that kind of model to higher education and universities as institutions.

The REF informed TEF; in fact Michael Barber says as much in his recent speech on the Office for Students. But the conditions for TEF’s appearance have been steadily establishing themselves for a long time. The older version of the REF, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), started in the 1980s as the application of public management ideas gained traction. The introduction of university fees for students at the end of the 1990s accelerated this (it was a solution to widening participation and access). All of these incremental moves lead us towards the reconceptualisation of universities as corporations, students as customers, and the introduction of business processes to university management.

In a way this is key to understanding the logic of TEF and the form it takes, i.e., reliance on metrics. Some kind of metricisation is a key requirement for the introduction of market dynamics in that it provides the ‘signal’ for market mechanisms to operate. (Note that just because the Gold-Silver-Bronze categorisation system is adjectival does not mean it is no longer functioning as a metric.)

As I mentioned, the ideology of TEF seems to be based in the assumption that market dynamics are the way to improve almost anything. Since this is the essential model to be applied to all sectors of life, there clearly can be no suspension for universities.

This leads me to two big questions. Firstly, the sheer complexity and cost of TEF and REF is enormous. The desire is for TEF to become subject specific, thus incurring even more administrative burden. It is interesting to see that a cost-benefit argument is specifically not used with either TEF or REF in order to justify the expenditure. More on that in the next section.

The second big question here is about what I guess you could call the epistemology of TEF’s instigators. It needs examining. Do they believe metricisation throws into the light some hidden naturally occurring order of things embedded into universities but hitherto invisible? Or do they view it metricisation as a mechanic to manipulate and control the university sector? Again, there is very little forthcoming on this, perhaps because even suggesting such questions threatens to shed some light on the central assumptions of TEF.

Given the trends I think it possible (but not necessarily likely) that current and future governments will gradually attempt to move TEF towards an Ofsted-like approach to assessing higher education, i.e., greater oversight, greater powers, involving in-depth inspections (preferably by peers but there a few guarantees), and stronger sanctions. The use of ‘Teaching Excellence’ terminology rather than ‘Student Experience’ implies that indirect measures of teaching quality are only the beginning. 

This leads to the following points on language and strategy.

Language and strategy

The language of TEF and indeed REF is positioned in ways that make it seem churlish to oppose. I suspect this is intentional, but I don’t know. The strategic move here has been to align TEF (aspirationally) with teaching rather than ‘reported student experience’ (which would be more accurate). But in line with what I noted above, this is a neat trick since TEF currently only uses indirect measures of teaching in order to map out institutions to the Gold-Silver-Bronze categorisation scheme — in other words there is no direct examination of teaching at all (e.g., via observation).

TEF is thus explicitly affiliated with categories of ‘teaching excellence’ and the rigour-inflected notion of ‘framework’. This means opposition to TEF then tends to affiliate with inversions of those things, because that’s how language generally works. No-one can be reasonably be against ‘teaching excellence’, therefore criticising the very idea of the TEF is met with astonishment (compare this with criticisms that merely seek to tweak its metrics to be ‘more accurate’ or ‘representative’ — i.e., that accept the very idea). To critique TEF in this fundamental way — essentially a critique of ways of knowing, i.e., epistemological — is thus readily taken to be against ‘teaching excellence’ as important (which everyone wants) and therefore ‘you are bad’. It would be good to see the discourse advance a bit here.

Institutionalisation

It also seems that, with the TEF and the REF, there is a gradual process of institutionalisation taking place for academics and those working in universities. Surely we should expect academics, as critically-minded people, to be very careful when engaging in metricisation of, say, natural or social phenomena? (It’s their job!) 

It goes like this: At first there is outright skepticism. This then crumbles into skeptical participation (with a nudge and a wink indicating ‘what we all really think about it’). But when the prizes are awarded, the process of acclimatisation is complete, particularly for the winners. 

Gold-award institutions in particular come to feel that the metric has been truthful and proven what they already knew: that their teaching is indeed excellent. While schemes as TEF ‘have their teething problems’ for some there no longer is much skepticism about the fundamentals of the exercise. The role of self-congratulation is important here. As Emilie Murphy states “by applauding TEF results we implicitly accept this framework and its methodologies”. 

As the acclimatisation proceeds we see an institutionalisation process taking place. Internal, institutional systems are set up to replicate the TEF or REF in order to ensure that in the next round we are favoured / improve / whatever. After this, internal-TEFs or internal-REFs are then connected with performance assessment, progression, and promotion as part of the logic of managerialism. The end result is that externally-specified and mandated metricisation mechanisms come to significantly influence and shape the guts of academic life: how papers are written and published, which research ideas are pursued, how teaching is configured, how students are treated, etc. This is often glossed as ‘game playing’ but this overlooks the wider potentially deleterious effects that happen downstream as a result of that game playing.

Of course, it is unfair to paint this picture of acquiescence without noting that schemes like TEF (eventually) and REF (currently) wield huge sticks in order to get that level of compliance. If it was me in charge I accept I’d probably have to acquiesce too. For TEF the stick is student fee levels, while for REF it is core funding. The stakes are enormous for universities: and you have little choice but to play. Rather than blaming the people involved in the acquiescence or institutionalisation, perhaps it’s more like the frog-in-boiling-water parable.

The really sad thing about TEF and institutionalisation is that universities are already saturated with ways of assessing and improving teaching. Student evaluations of modules, surveys, peer observation and feedback, connecting PGCHE certification to promotion requirements, meetings and workshops on sharing best practice, institutional support (e.g., courses) for developing teaching skills and techniques, etc. There are many obvious ways to improve teaching from a national point of view that don’t involve logic of metricisation. While I’d like to be pleasantly surprised, I do doubt whether the TEF is really going to genuinely enhance teaching.