Serendipity35

 Andy Warhol outside a shop called Serendipity.

Serendipity35 was on a little hiatus. It's summer. I'm busy and a few times when I did drop in on the admin page here, the site was offline. I took that as a sign to not work on a post. 

Summer in education is always slower. Our readers are off a bit (but we did get 2,365,491 hits last month) but people are still reading.

I'm working on a new course for 2015 and on a new program for teacher training. I'm prepping my one fall course. I'm trying to get some vacation time, but not being very successful with the planning.

Tim recently was married and he has been in summer mode as admin and out of touch when it comes to writing any posts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you have tried to make a comment on a post here at Serendipity35 lately, you will have found that they are turned off. After an attack months ago that left us with many thousands of spam comments, Tim turned off the commenting feature. If you try to comment, it will reject it.

That is a sad thing because, although we didn't get all that many comments considering the number of hits the site gets, it was good to read them.

I still love to look at the recent visitors widget on the site and see where people are coming from who are reading my posts. It is very international. (So were all the spambots.)

I also know that some readers have gone to the trouble of doing a search to find me on LinkedIn, twitter or other places and contacted me.

So, this is just to say that it's not that we don't want to hear from you. We just can't deal with the spam right now. If a better software solution becomes available, we'll hear from you again in the future.

I use SlideShare to share my slide presentations with the world. They send me weekly stats and they always surprise me.

This last week, the most viewed was one on "Moodle: a free learning management system" which has had 47,000 views. I feel a bit embarrassed by that because the presentation is kind of out of date by now. I think I should do an update. Obviously, there is interest.

The latest popular download of the week was one I did on "Student Blogs As Reflective Practice."

My SlideShare stats showed that 1,000 people have embedded one of my slide presentations on their blog or site. Some can be embedded as a slideshow but some are pdf documents and 2000 times people have downloaded the presentation. That is way more people than I will ever stand in front of live and share a presentation.

I started using Slideshare seven years ago when I posted a set of slides with quotations that I was using in a teacher workshop. I wanted to make them available to the teachers later, so I posted them and told them they could download the PowerPoint and then edit or use it in any way. It was an easy way to open source the idea. (You can add a Creative Commons license to your uploaded work. I generally use the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.)  That set of "Thirty Quotations" has had more than 18,000 views. A few people who downloaded it have even emailed me to let me know how they used them in their classes. I uploaded a "Thirty Quotations Volume 2" the following year.

The really surprising stat that Slideshare emailed me this month was this: 5 Titanics worth of people have viewed those slides. That's one way to think of big data - though I might prefer to think of my readers as being on a Caribbean cruise ship rather than a doomed ocean liner. 

I finished the transition of Serendipity35 from an "all iron" computer server machine to a virtual entity in the internet cloud.  Its almost as if I took its computer soul and installed it in the heavens.

Almost, but not quite...

We're ready to rock n' roll.