The Autistic Survival Guide WikiBook

marcMarc Segar was a British autist who died in a car accident in 1997 at the age of 23 years old.

Despite his short life, Marc’s legacy includes two books: The Battles of the Autistic Thinker, and A Survival Guide for people with Asperger Syndrome. The Survival Guide was one of the original ‘first-person’ accounts of Asperger’s Syndrome, and has been widely praised for it’s applicability to real life scenarios. The Guide has been translated into French and German, and remains relevant today. Both books can be freely downloaded from sources including Autism and Computing, and a pdf version that prints well was made available by Alistair Edwards of the University of York.

Marc’s legacy, however, goes further than the original books. Since 2005, the Survival Guide has continued as a WikiBook, which you can read and contribute to online. There is continuing interest in it, borne out by an average of 400 views each month, but recently editing has diminished, so it has not changed for nearly a year. Do please take a look at the Guide, and see if there is a contribution you can make to it; for example, the existing Guide does not say anything about getting married or raising kids. Even if you can’t find something to add, you will still find it a very worthwhile read, and a WikiBook, pdf and printable versions are offered.   cc-by-sa 80x15

If this topic interests you, do please take a look at my previous review of four other Free Autism Spectrum e-books, and I just want to thank Martin Poulter for initially drawing my attention to the Guide.

Exploring Play – a new free online course

The approach of UK Playday is a good reason to look at a new MOOC (massive open online course) on Play.

hero_4eca714f-1f05-4154-a293-0247e0a7d533Exploring Play: The Role of Play in Everyday Life, is a seven week long course beginning on 29 September 2014. It aims to help us to think differently about play, and discover why something that is so often taken for granted is actually very important and significant to us all.
The course is offered by the University of Sheffield on the attractive FutureLearn platform, and is led by respected Professor Elizabeth Wood. It requires 4 hours of study time per week, a total of 28 hours overall. The course is free to study, and if required, a Certificate of Participation is available at £25. The course will be of interest if you wish to work or study in the fields of psychology, playwork, childhood studies, play therapy, hospital play, teaching, childcare, or if you just want to better understand your relationship with your own children and your own play.

playday logoBefore then, UK Playday is Wednesday 6th August this year, with a theme of ‘the Importance of Play’. On Playday thousands of children and their families get out to play at hundreds of community events across the UK. The Playday 2014 website is live, so organisations can start registering their events, and individuals can begin planning their days – there are lots of ways to get involved!

Two free textbooks on the future of families

Families are changing dramatically; these two textbooks explore the implications from practical, legal, ethical and philosophical perspectives.

fpl-med1. Families, policy and the law: Selected essays on contemporary issues for Australia (2014)  Edited by by Alan Hayes and Daryl Higgins.
The Australian Institute of Family Studies recently released this new collection of essays on family policy and the law to inform government, legal professionals, service providers and the community about changes in these areas in recent years. The book explores a range of topics including trends in family formation; the child protection system; relationship breakdown; family violence and developments in social science and the law. The book includes contributions from 38 Australian authors in four key sections:
* Diverse family formation: Identity, recognition and law
* Legal and statutory responses to families in difficulty
* Relationship breakdown and family policies and practices
* Social science and developments in Australian law relating to families, safety and child wellbeing
The 29 essays occupy 326 pages and the volume is published in an impressive array of formats: pdf, epub, kindle and paper.  cc by

thumb-large-97817809301142. Families – Beyond the Nuclear Ideal (2012) Edited by Daniela Cutas & Sarah Chan.
In this book, the authors consider a range of relationship and family structures that depart from the nuclear family ideal: polyamory and polygamy, single and polyparenting, parenting by gay and lesbian couples, as well as families created through current and prospective modes of assisted human reproduction such as surrogate motherhood, donor insemination, and reproductive cloning. The arguments that recommend or disqualify each of these as legitimate units in our societies are posed and discussed in 14 chapters:
* The Role of Sexual Partnership in UK Family Law
* The Two-Parent Limitation in ART Parentage Law
* The Best Interest of Children and the Basis of Family Policy
* Donor-conceived Children Raised by Lesbian Couples
* Donor-Conception as a ‘Dangerous Supplement’ to the Nuclear Family
* Choosing Single Motherhood?
* Surrogacy
* Licensing Parents
* Liberal Feminism and the Ethics of Polygamy
* Distinguishing Polygamy and Polyamory Under the Criminal Law
* Sex and Relationships
* Human Cloning and the Family in the New Millennium
* Moral and Legal Constraints on Human Reproductive Cloning
The 14 chapters occupy 220 pages, and the publishers Bloomsbury Academic have made it freely available to read onlineCC by nc

At first glance, these two books might seem like chalk and cheese, but they complement one-another well. The new Australian book is a comprehensive volume that I can imagine referring to repeatedly during a working week. In contrast, I’ve had Cutas & Chan’s book for some time, and have found myself reading it of an evening, when there’s time to think through the complex ethical and philosophical issues that it raises.

Finally, if you’re looking for free textbooks on families, do remember Sociology of the Family (2010) by Hammond & Cheney, that heads-up my page on Free e-textbooks.