Serendipity35

This blog has passed another anniversary (or is it a birthday?) today. Since the first post in 2006 ("Why Serendipity35?") as a test of blogging software, we have now amassed 3,133 entries. 

Sometimes posting these articles seems like throwing out a message in a bottle because I don't usually know who might find it or read it. Tim shut off commenting a few years ago because he got tired of the hundreds and (on some bad days) thousands of spam hits. But we have our stats and the blog with its wagging long tail still gets a lot of hits. Last month Serendipity35 had 1,024,502 hits, so even allowing for some spammers and bots, someone is reading.

So, I'll keep writing. I do want to hit double digits in blog age.

It was on January 28, 1754 that the word "serendipity" was first coined. It was long before this blog and yet we feel a kind of connection. We like that it means "the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for" and that it was listed by a U.K. translation company as one of the English language's 10 most difficult words to translate. Easy definitions are never any fun.

Back in 1754 the writer Horace Walpole wrote in a letter to a friend that he came up with the word after a fairy tale he once read, called "The Three Princes of Serendip."

"as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of."

Those three princes were from modern-day Sri Lanka and "serendip" is the Persian word for the island nation off the southern tip of India, Sri Lanka.

I was reminded on today's entry on the Writers Almanac with Garrison Keillor that many inventions can be attributed to some serendipity, including Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber, inkjet printers, Silly Putty, the Slinky, chocolate chip cookies, Fleming discovering penicillin. Viagra had been developed to treat hypertension and angina pectoris, but turned out to be better at something else, just as the discoveries of radioactivity, X-rays, and infrared radiation all turned up when researchers were looking for something else.

Brother Tim and I had our reasons for choosing the name back in 2005 and, as we approach our 10 year anniversary, if you sometimes find valuable or agreeable things not sought for by reading these posts, that would please these two modern day princes of serendip very much.

Many months ago, Brother Tim, Serendipity35 IT guy and very occasional blogger here, started this post. It has been staring at me in the drafts queue and today I decided to dust it off a bit and send it out into the cloud.

So, there I was at Miller Air Park fueling the Piper Archer airplane I had rented for a flight down to Cape May County airport.  It was a busy morning for the airport and several planes were in  pre-flight, being taxied to the northeast end of the runway, or were already cocked into the wind, holding-short of runway 24 doing their pre-takeoff run-up.  Each pilot in turn completed the safety checklist, pivoted onto the runway, firewalled the throttle and lifted the aircraft into the smooth gray sky.

In the 30 minutes or so that I had spent pre-flighting and fueling my own plane there were 7 departures but, except for a pre-solo student and instructor locked into the never ending left turns of take-off and landing pattern practice, no other aircraft arrived at MJX.

Ken and I are sometimes like the FBO staff at Miller Air Park.  We send post after post off into the Internet clouds and, every once in a while, we receive an arrival. A returned comment here and there lets us know that the posts we roll off our Internet tarmac aren't falling off the edge of our flat earth.
Ken builds almost all of the wordcraft we launch and I spend most of my time clearing turkey buzzards and deer off our virtual runway, but once in a while, I get to fly a post of my own. And on that Saturday morning in Whiting, NJ, I held the nose on the centerline and rotated that Piper into the air. 

I climbed to 400 ft and turned left toward the coastline. Over my shoulder, as I approached 1000 ft, I could see the massive airship hangars of Lakehurst Naval Air Station and the abandoned, but standing, stall of the Hindenburg, unoccupied since May of 1937 when the dirigible burned at her mooring.  When it departed Frankfurt, Germany on May 3rd that year, the crew that launched her expected a return, too. Though it was scheduled to fly back from North America to Europe with a full manifest of transatlantic passengers en route to the coronation of King George VI of England, its final destination remained in New Jersey.
Fifty years after the famous crash, long after it was branded a mystery and pursued only by academic enterprise, the actual cause of the craft's incineration was discovered. The paint that protected its outer skin from the harsh ocean crossing, burned like a magnesium fuse when lit by lightning over land.

I quickly flew through Atlantic City's airspace and continued inbound to the Sea Isle City VOR. My checkpoints, spaced on my chart at 10 minute intervals, rolled underneath my right wing at 8, then 7, minutes.  I was ahead of schedule and soon I'd arrive at WWD 10 minutes before my flight plan had estimated.
Traffic was light at Cape May County. I radioed the airport's CTAF for the active runway and entered the downwind pattern for 28.  There were no other aircraft in the pattern (or rolling on the ground) and I touched down just past the threshold markers and turned off at the first taxi-way. Not stopping to visit, I headed back to the east end of runway 28, throttled back up and, five minutes after I had first touched down, was airborne again and heading home.
I flew back to Miller through the same airspace that the Hindenburg traveled on its last day.  I landed, safely, just a few miles from where the dirigible fell to the ground.  It had only taken a couple of hours but I returned to the airport from which I'd departed -- a luxury the Hindenburg pilot never had.
Maybe fifty years from now, like the paint on an unburned scrap of the Hindenburg, some word, sentence or phrase from Serendipity35 (or some other Internet archived version of it *) will drop out of the clouds and reveal some small unintended truth about the technology and learning lives we live today.

Although the Wayback machine at archive.org only began to archive Serendipity35 pages back in 2009, at least there is some other record of our time here on the Net.


 

I posted a piece here called "What Is Authentic Learning?" last month. It has been clicked (and read, hopefully) over 600 times. No comments on it because we still have comments turned off on Serendipity35 because of the spamstorms we have weathered in the past.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn sent me an email inviting me to post in my space on their platform. Now, I don't need to do any more blogging. Besides Serendipity35, I have five other blogs that I try to keep going, including a daily poem practice I'm doing for 2014.

Nevertheless, as an experiment, I decided to crosspost some of my posts from here to LinkedIn. That same post about authentic learning on LinkedIn has 2400 views and 140 "likes" so far. But I am more interested in the 41 comments. There were some really interesting comments - especially the negative/critical ones. There was a conversation about the topic.

Not all the reposts have gotten more attention. The next best post, "Your Data Is Big, But Is It Thick?" only has half the reach of the "Authenic Learning" post and others have only a hundred or so views (and are surpassed by Serendipity35's version).

This blog gets a lot of hits every month - for July 2014 it was 2,365,491 - but that's over the long tail of the more than 3000 posts here.

So, what does that surge on the LinkedIn version of a post mean? It's the same content. The only thing that changed is the platform. LinkedIn has "reach," a bigger audience than this blog, and a different audience (more in the business of tech than the teachin of or with tech?). I don't have any way to measure the "who" of this blog. I can look at stats about the "what" (the popular categories), the "how" (what browsers you use, what sites referred to to me), and the "when" about times when folks drop by to read. The live traffic feed in the sidebar here and our stats let me know the "where" of visitors (it's very global). What Tim and I can't see is the "why" and the "who."  Who are you and why did you drop by?

I imagine my readers as being educators who are interested in using technology - versions of myself. But I don't know if that's true. Tim will tell you that you are not clickers of ads. Tim gets the results of any clicks on the Google ads in the sidebar. He is still waiting for that to generate an actual payment for clicks and has promised me a McGoo burger and beer at McGoverns.