Original picture by OpenSourceWay.
It's finally here: the last week in sharing of 2011. The next time we'll speak, it'll be the prelude to the apocalyptic finale of December 2012. So enjoy these links, while you can.
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What happens when the DC establishment begins to see the importance of understanding decentralized hacker collectives? Probably a lot of confused discussion about terminology. The Atlantic has the real story of anonymous going to Washington.
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Meanwhile, online security company McAfee released a set of 2012 predictions, including the collapse and reorganization of anonymous. Anonymous Operations responded on Twitter: "Orly?"
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From Make mag, a list of their top 10 favorite 3D printed objects from 2011, including a really cool clock and a fully functional lock. This is one list I know will only get better in 2012.
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For instance, the folks at The Economist are positively giddy at the promise of 3D printing.
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When it comes to open access materials on the web, US colleges are doing something rare: competing over making it cheaper to learn. Althought you sill won't be able to get a comparable degree out of it, MIT is taking the lead in offering free courses online.
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From Digital Photography School, their year's end list of eleven free online photography tutorials, including how to shoot the night sky.
- Rebecca Solnit identifies a monumental shift over what she calls the "year of compassion." The essayist desribes it in her piece "Our New Currency."
MIT's OpenCourseWare is a leader in free on-line education. But MITx is vaporware right now. People should be looking at the 16 innovative courses Stanford is offering on their platform in Jan/Feb. For example, the course Model Thinking (http://www.modelthinker-class.org) looks very interesting. Each course has its own domain name but you can find all the other courses linked at the bottom. So go to the Model Thinking course to find links to the other 15 courses.
Stanford's system launched several months ago. I took their course Introduction to Databases (http://db-class.org) and earned a Statement of Accomplishment from the Instructor (enrollment is still open, so you can still take the course in archive mode). Stanford's system is unique in that you can earn Statement of Accomplishment by completing a substantial portion of the course, deadlines to spur progress, a shared experience with fellow students, and automatically graded exercises, quizzes, and exams.