Four short links: 30 November 2012

Kids Design With Minecraft, MOOC Analysis, Hobbit Revisited, and Santa's Little Drones

  1. Kids Use Minecraft to Design School“Students have been massively enthusiastic, with many turning up early to school to work on their Minecraft designs and they continue to do so at home too.” Also see the school’s blog.
  2. Napster, Udacity, and the Academy (Clay Shirky) — the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. […] The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
  3. The Hobbit, Redux — the main programmer for The Hobbit game was a woman. Under-credited, as usual.
  4. Aerial Drones — from the Make magazine holiday gift guide. I want five of everything, please Santa.
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