I do believe in the Six Million Dollar Man, but not Bigfoot…

Now hold on to your comments, kids. I believe in Serendipity, I live and breathe its fumes for all of my online career.. How else might I have gotten to house sit for a month in Iceland, have a German Rock Band use my photo for cover of a CD, or get invited to do a month of workshops/presentations in Australia crammed into two weeks?? I would think “Serendipity” is my middle name.

But Serendipity is not a thing. You do not create it or cause it or make it.. it happens.

This has been rolling around in the part of my brain that carefully organizes drafts for blog posts (hah) after Deen Shareski-d Pursuing Intentional Serendipity. Now, as usual, I agreed, grokked, nodded with all Dean wrote:

I think the phrase I’m looking for is intentional serendipity. I think it’s Peter Skillen’s term but there may be others using a similar concept. In a world where play and wonder should really be considered essential dispositions, our education rarely values learning that isn’t somehow tied to a chosen standard or outcome.

and he goes on to relate the typical, serendipitous type of thing that happens when you participate in open spaces (in this case, a conference thing that was amped up by interactions from the tweet thing).

But it is this phrase “intentional serendipity” that has been nagging at me, in the semantic construct (if I knew what that meant I would explain, but it sounds like PhD stuff). Dean links to the blog post with this title by Peter Skillen, where really he describes the same spirit of allowing for serendipity to happen. In Peter’s case, the phrase in the name he gives his computer; I guess because it is the starting point for his actions that end up in serendipitous acts.

I just do not want to give the impression to anyone that they can go about and do things and expect the serendipity to happen, to make it intentional.

@cogdog As chairman of the Cormier award’s committee i hereby confirm you as a Doctor of Philosophy in the internets.

— dave cormier (@davecormier) January 12, 2012

It cant be serendipity and intentional, because serendipity is accidental (go ahead and take away my honorary Dave Cormier degree for quoting Wikipedia):

Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages. Julius H. Comroe once described serendipity as “to look for a needle in a haystack and get out of it with the farmer’s daughter”.

Even if Wikipedia is full of crap, I love tis jumping off point for the word’s source (my emphasis added):

The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1792). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa or golden island (some trace the etymology to Simhaladvipa which literally translates to “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island”).

And oh where the tangents lead…

William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: “making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design”. A zemblanity is, effectively, an “unpleasant surprise”. It derives from Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla), a cold, barren land with many features opposite to the lush Sri Lanka (Serendip). On this island Willem Barents and his crew were stranded while searching for a new route to the east.

I think many of you work in places where zemblanity is a common practice?

Why am I carrying on about this when I agree with the sentiments? Because I think the distinction of operating in a mode where your actions are aimed not at gaining the results of serendipity (expecting the happy accidents), but by doing things that in general, create a potential energy for happy accidents to happen.

It’s a bit I started talking about the last time I did a talk on Amazing Stories of Openness. If you act in the Open mindset, e.g. start sharing your work openly, connecting and commenting on the work of others, contribute ideas to projects elsewhere that interest you — rhere is absolutely no guarantee that any of these amazing things (invited trips overseas, having your photos appear in published books, getting job offers) will happen to you. I believe it becomes more likely.

BUT… if you do not do any sharing or open activities, I can certainly guarantee you that no Amazing Stories will happen to you.

It is… as Nancy White said the first time I did these “Openness is not just about open resources, it is about open attitudes”.

In my mind, serendipity is not intentional, nor is it a thing we can pursue– it is a force generated as a secondary (or many-ary) results of our actions of sharing, helping, contributing. It is when we create a potential opportunity for the unexpected to happen, when we step out of our status quo or usual circles (one example why twitter matters much more than Facebook/Google+ for the greater opportunity to hear from people I do not know).

It comes about again in this short piece on Structured Serendipity by Jason Zweig for the Edge 2011 Question. Zweig, a financial columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writes here about his technique for being creative in his writing- he reads from sources not normally in hos field AND he physically changes the environment where he does his reading (my emphasis added):

It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field that is new to me — and to read it in a different place.

New associations often leap out of the air at me this way; more intriguingly, others seem to form covertly and then to lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to force these associations out into the open; they are like shrinking mimosa plants that crumple if you touch them but bloom if you leave them alone.

Robert Merton argued that many of the greatest discoveries of science have sprung from serendipity. As a layman and an amateur, all I hope to accomplish by throwing myself in serendipity’s path is to pick up new ideas, and combine old ones, in ways that haven’t quite occurred to other people yet. So I let my curiosity lead me wherever it seems to want to go, like that heart-shaped piece of wood that floats across a Ouija board.

I do this remote-reading exercise on my own time, since it would be hard to justify to newspaper editors during the work day. But my happiest moments this autumn came as I reported an investigative article on how elderly investors are increasingly being scammed by elderly con artists. I later realized, to my secret delight, that the article had been enriched by a series of papers I had been reading on altruistic behavior among fish (Lambroides dimidiatus).

If I do my job right, my regular readers will never realize that I spend a fair amount of my leisure time reading Current Biology, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. If that reading helps me find new ways to understand the financial world, as I suspect it does, my readers will indirectly be smarter for it. If not, the only harm done is my own spare time wasted.

In my view, we should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces. This kind of structured serendipity just might help us become more creative, and I doubt that it can hurt.

I really connect to this idea of reaching outside of our familiar places/sources of information, and for doing so without a direct purpose, and that the things we come across in doing this might never come up again, but just might, as sort of a sub conscious absorption, become something that makes for a model or a metaphor when we are trying to be creative. To me this goes for any field, and seeding ourselves with ideas from different places cannot but help by a fuel for the work we do, down the road.

If I were of the resoluting type, I might state to try this approach more.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by jef safi (writing)

Chance.

Why did I turn left and not right? why did I take the stairs and not the elevator? There’s no answer.

A few weekends ago, I was enjoying a magically beautiful weekend in San Francisco, and after a lovely lunch in Sausalito, just happened to walk out to the waters edge to see this guy:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

He was calmly doing what seemed impossible, assembling these improbable balancing acts– and under extremely windy conditions. I honestly spent about 10 minutes here, snapping a few pics, and as habitual, posted the ones I like in flickr.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Usually photos get flickr-ed and they quietly slide away in the stream as you add more. Until you see a comment like:

One more time, I quietly post my pictures, and the artist discovers my photo and tells me? Isn’t this the complete flip of the artist/performer/leader versus the audience structure? Yes, I know people spend time surfing to find when their work is mentioned, but there is something here that makes my spine tingle.

And thus, I fall down the rabbit hole clicking, going farther out into the great wide internet open… I end of on Bill Dan’s flickr page (look at him, his flickr url is “rocker”)

In there you will find photos and short videos of his work, see it done in action. I learn from captions he has a philosophy of creating these sculptures in public parks and also of not leaving them, he returns the rocks and sticks. He also freely teaches and demonstrates the power of counterbalance, the key to his work.

We glibly talk of finding “balance” in our lives, do we ever apply principles of counter balance?

From there I land on Bill’s YouTube channel, full of videos of his creations being made. I google his name and find a full site at the curious URL http://rock-on-rock-on.com/– created by someone who appears to be a fan of Bill Dan:

George Daliel Leite presents the work of San Francisco, California balanced rock sculptor Bill Dan and the art, discipline and craft of rock balancing and balanced stone stacking around the world. Included are images of Bill’s balanced stones and rocks, links to other rock balancers and examples of their work, with information about naturally balancing rocks and world-wide stone balancing and rock stacking traditions.

And so it hints at there is a number of people who do rock balancing? I then follow a ink to Bill’s blog, “The Rocker”. These are posts with more photos, but I read the sidebar and learn Bill Dan has been at this since 1994.

Even curiouser, I am looking at the archive on this blog, and the oldest indicates a first post from back in 2005. Even more odd, this post has no comment but 64 comments (like 6 times as many as I have ever gotten on a single post).

Most overtly, people are gushing glad that via a simple blog (that has a first post with nothing in it), they now have a channel to comunicate with the artist. Think of this as Before Blog and After Blog. Without a public presence, Bill would not have heard stories like:

Thanks for the inspiration! I saw you at Chrissy field a year or two ago and didn’t talk to you. Infact, I thought you were sort of strange, but yesterday, I was out there and my son was looking for you. You weren’t there so we started our own little rock formation. It was such a pleasant, almost zen-like experience to stack rocks that I’m looking forward to doing it again. Thanks for the inspiration!

We were in Sausalito and wondered what everyone was looking at across the street…and we were utterly amazed. We could barely believe our eyes but then Bill offered to take one of his sculptures apart and redo it for us. Amazing. Go and see it for yourself!!

Bill, you inspire me. I’m a confessed conpulsive stacker. If I don’t have rocks I’ll stack anything that comes to hand. My personal best was 34 plastic baby dinosaurs with my left hand only on the Victoria Clipper ride to Victoria, Canada. But rocks have always been my muse. My Native friends find me amusing. It’s OK though because they beleive me when I claim that I “hear” the rocks calling me out to play. I’m so glad there are others out there who can and will move the world in such simple and inspiring ways. Thank you!

I just picked a few comments out, and have to mention that Bill replied to many of them. This is the stuff all of the openness of the net is about- connections that would not have been possible or likely without it. And if this is some golden era before commercial entities or totalitarian governments take it away, I just want to be able to say– I was there.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search on technology. From the results, on the left side bar, click the link for timeline.

Now you can adjust the time range, or change the search terms, this time, say I wanted to create a search history timeline for China

It could be an interesting activity/exercise to create other timelines.

Google embeds surprising functional bits i search results. Looking to calculate a currency exchange? Just google “currency exchange” and you get a widget calculator right there.

Have you found other embedded tools in search results?

Thanks for the surprise serendipity (as if there were any other kind!)

If we just lived our lives out by setting, pursuing, and meeting objectives, what a sterile world it would be. Here;s to what you learn when you are not expecting too, and for surfing by serendipity.

Serendipity is following the curious post titles in your RSS reader, leading my to Andy Rush sharing his discovery of a utility called Evom (well that was a nice find there– ).

But since Andy played around with the backwards spelling things– I thought it would be fun to write a bit of my comments in reverse text.

Now I thought I did this in BBEdit before, but I think I did something insane like a grep search to put each letter on a separate line, a reverse line sort, and a search and replace on the line return characters.

Surel;y someone has created something like that already– googled a bit on on reverse text generator, and what do you know? The first hit is Lucky-

The Reverse Text Generator does not only backward, but also Flipped, and Upside Down:

So playing with my opening sentence, I can do things like:

.ytipidneres yb gnifrus rof dna ,oot gnitcepxe ton era uoy nehw nrael uoy tahw ot s;ereH .eb dluow ti dlrow elirets a tahw ,sevitcejbo gniteem dna ,gniusrup ,gnittes yb tuo sevil ruo devil tsuj ew fI

or

Fi ew tsuj devil ruo sevil tuo yb gnittes, gniusrup, dna gniteem sevitcejbo, tahw a elirets dlrow ti dluow eb. Ereh;s ot tahw uoy nrael nehw uoy era ton gnitcepxe oot, dna rof gnifrus yb ytipidneres.

and the ever useful

˙ʎʇıdıpuǝɹǝs ʎq ƃuıɟɹns ɹoɟ puɐ ‘ooʇ ƃuıʇɔǝdxǝ ʇou ǝɹɐ noʎ uǝɥʍ uɹɐǝן noʎ ʇɐɥʍ oʇ s؛ǝɹǝɥ ˙ǝq pןnoʍ ʇı pןɹoʍ ǝןıɹǝʇs ɐ ʇɐɥʍ ‘sǝʌıʇɔǝɾqo ƃuıʇǝǝɯ puɐ ‘ƃuınsɹnd ‘ƃuıʇʇǝs ʎq ʇno sǝʌıן ɹno pǝʌıן ʇsnɾ ǝʍ ɟı

And this is just one of 20 free tools in the TextMechanic’s toolbox- a lot of them extremely useful.

So a little bit of goofing off, and I find something like this.

As Rick Schwier said…

But more so, it always sends a ripple down the spine, when I stare at this screen and knowing I am looking at a doorway to the infinite– not that the internet is really infinite, but relative to what I can know, see touch of it– it might as well be.

And there is infinitely more to know and find than what I can store in that grey spongy mass upstairs.

Goofing off is part of my method. And blecch to all my grade school teachers who scolded me for that.

Bleccch.

I ride the InfiniVerse.

For dailyshoot I check in the morning what the assignment is usually by a visit to their twitter page or checking an RSS feed). For naming of my daily photos, I use a title based on the day number of the year (today is the 64th day of the year). I usually flip open a Mac OS X dashboard widget I found 2 years ago, but I have to enter the date for it to calculate the day of the year.

In one tweet, I now have a more elegant solution, and learned something I did not know was possible.

@dailyshoot shared this message:

Tip from @lyzadanger on a great way to keep up with the Daily Shoot: http://bit.ly/apTnnc Thanks Lyza!

Basically, you use the Safari browser (just to set these up) to visit the Dailyshoot assignments page, and select Open in Dashboard from the File menu.

This presents an interface where you can size the portion of the page you want to use, in this case, the top left is always the most recent assignment:

and when you click Add on the far right, it makes a Dashboard widget from that web content- so when the site changes tomorrow, my widget will as well.

Wow, who knew one could do that? Well I didn’t.

So I went one more, and I looked for a web page that would show the current date as a day number of the year- This site from Calendar Date shows more than I need, but I clipped it to show the calendar, current day highlighted, and at the bottom in gray text it gives the day number.

Now I have both tools on my dashboard

I don’t know what else I might need this for, but knowing I can clip bits of the web on my dashboard is a nice little trick to have in the MacArsenal.

Some of my favorite software moments are accidentally discovering something new in a tool I’ve been using for some time. This happened recently my my current iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2. I’m not writing about this app, but I’d heard people rave about it, shrugged them off, then eventually later found out they were right. It is smartly designed.

I’d noticed when looking at someone’s profile that there is a number below their icon… (and actually I was not ego-ing my own profile, its just an example) (seriously) (I swear).

So what is #740,343? Perhaps its obvious, but I wanted to know. Maybe it is some sort of ranking, like I am the 740,343rd ranked tweeter. Yeah, I could only dream to rank that high.

My hunch was/is that it is more or less my database ID in twitter, a user number, and therefore, the lower the number, the earlier you joined. (later– this makes sense when looking at my RSS URL http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/740343.rss)

I looked at a few accounts I know are recent (this year), and sure enough they are in the #16,000,000′s. And then I looked at Cole Camplese‘s profile, cause I more or less followed him in January 2007 when he started blogging about twitter:

Sure enough, he is #690,253 a little before me (scooped again by the Senator from Pennsylvania!).

I cannot even think of the value of knowing this is, besides scratching the curiosity itch.

But next, I was curious about the little card icon– like here in Scott Leslie‘s profile:

Nice, look at the big number– #3,567,831 – courtesy of the great Jaiku walkout, eh? ;-)

But here was a nice feature, clicking the card icon added info from this twitter profile to my address book:

It added his twitter icon, twitter URL, and below the fold, his mini bio in a notes field.

This again, is hardly world changing, or even significant, but it struck me as a nicely, understated feature in Tweetie 2 (and its primary features are plenty enough as is).

So what have you found my clicking mystery buttons? Probably more than me….

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Impact Tarmac

So it was a wonderful surprise when on last week’s plane travel I watched his TED Talk on The Web as random acts of kindness

Zittrain here gives a brilliant, upbeat talk, and actually explains how the internet works (no tubes) – as he does so by comparing the movement of packets to how a beer gets passed down the row to someone at the ball game.

More than that, the picture he paints that the mechanisms and bits that make the whole machine hum along, the vehicle that propels Wikipedia, has to do with a small number of people volunteering to do collective acts of good deeds, kind of Amazing Story like things

The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.

I see them all the time, and often barely take notice (maybe because I am used to them). Just today, I got an email from Doug Gilford, letting me know that he changed the URLs of a blog post I had written… back in 2005.

Oh yes, some of it is in his own interest, as the links lead to his on site, but he sat down and wrote a personal email. SO as a thanks, I will give a shout out here for Doug’s AMAZING site- the complete archive of MAD magazine covers http://www.madcoversite.com/.

To me, it is these single person niche web sites– brimming with passion for a specific topic — that are the positive outcomes of what the “millions of disinterested acts of kindness” enables.

Long live the odd, strange, dedicated, amazing web sites that are out there, more than anyone can count or know. Gawd, no I am getting teary eyed.

Your Flowing Data (YFD) is described by its creator, Nathan, as “a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself.” but that does not really capture the magic essence.

I stumbled here in one of those lovely incidents of web serendipity aka happy accidents. I was being interviewed last week by someone asking about emerging technologies, and I mentioned being interested visualizations of data. We started talking about great sites and tools- I mentioned Information Aesthetics and the interviewer mentioned another site called Flowing Data a blog about “Data and Visualization (subtitle “Strength in Numbers:).

It took about one glance and I was subscribing to the RSS feed, and it was scrolling down the bottom when I caught the link for Your Flowing Data (YFD).

So the ideas is that it is a site you can use to track data for things you do regularly, or might want to monitor over time. And the nifty trick is you use twitter Direct Messages to send data to your YFD account. Also smart is that it uses Twitter OAuth for this part and for authenticating your YFD account. You simply need to follow @yfd (so you can send direct messages)

On reading the guide, it suggested picking something that represents an action phrase like “ran 1 mile” “ate chocolate” “Watched Waterworld” (ew, that one will never be in my log). A key is using a consistent data input pattern,

I decided to aim for some health related activities. Since I test my blood sugar several times a day for my diabetes, this seemed like something that was do-able. After doing a test, all I needed to do was send a direct message to @yfd with a message of glucose XX where XX was the measured amount.

(I did mess up twice and sent a public tweet).

Now my blood glucose monitor already tracks data and actually transmits it by wireless to my insulin pump (which helps on calculating the amount of insulin to take at meal time), so actually I have automated data:

but here is the trick. To get the data off of the pump, I have to connect it to my PC (the software only works in Internet Explorer) and then the data is locked in some format where all I can is generate pre-designed reports as PDFs. I cant do anything with the data except look at it.

The data is there, it’s my data, my there are only limited things I can do with it. Its rigid.

SO yes, getting the data into the Flowing Data site is a tad tedious (typing direct messages), but the beauty is the open endedness of the choices you can make about what to record and how to use it. YFD does not define what I enter as only exercise data or movies watched or food ate– I can create my own taxonomy of action words and data types. YFD is neutral on the kinds fo data that go into it.

I also decided to track the miles I run (d yfd ran 12 miles– yeah I am dreaming!), bike (d yfd biked 25 miles — more dreaming!), and other exercise as I add (d yfd walked 3.5 miles… d yfd kayaked 6 miles). Actually I dont even need to include the “miles” if I assume any number I enter is in miles (or kilometers or cubits or nanometers). And on top of that, for any physical activity, I add the time spent in minutes (d yfd exercised 75 minutes).

If I just enter something directly, it references it to the current time, but you can also give a time when the activity occurred, like d yfd read War and Peace at 5:30am

The data in YFD is all private- I am the only one that can see my data, though I can share the results in ways I define.

My YFD home page on the web shows a snapsot of my recent activity:

There are several elegant ways to visualize all my activity, one by calendar that shows at a glancea long view (over a year) but allows me to quickly pull up data by day:

The Tree Map shows at a glance what your most frequent activities are, each one hyperlinked to filter the data by that activity

And I can also go right to my data logs, edit entries, and export data in tab delimited format (no API yet for data):

That gives you some flexibility in viewing data (and there are search terms on all these pages to narrow the scope), but you can also define your own “pages” where you can mix and match bits of your data like averages, sums over time, data by time, last data lists, etc each as “modules” that you can move about on a page like Google Gadgets– and these pages you can make private or public– so here is my Glucose Readings page:

http://your.flowingdata.com/cogdog/page/82/

And you can mis and match kidns of data, so I have an exercise page that has calculations on my total time exercising, and then data displays for my runs and walks, plus even some of the glucose stuff– http://your.flowingdata.com/cogdog/page/83/

Yes, the manual direct messaging for inputting data is not optimal- it would not take much for a real geek to figure out a way for my blood test gizmo to send a tweet for me– but imagine if all kinds of medical devices were recording data in real time, submitting it through the nets to places where doctors can see them at any time (not just an office visit) or be able to do more aggregate scanning of public health (which feeds into great ideas like crowdsourcing medical treatments at http://www.patientslikeme.com/).

I’ve still not done enough to get a feel for the value of this as a tracking tool over the long haul, but I am most excited about how open ended a system this is. You can define any kinds of reporting system that you can dream up- you just need to frame it in verbs (actions) and nouns (measurements). And being able to mix and match data in such an easy way to generate visuals feels really powerful. I still don’t have an inkling for what, but sometimes you don’t know the full potential of something til later.

Mmmm, yummy data. And visualization!

It may take a bit long to load as it seems to be hitting the flickr api pretty hard.

So find an interval in time, and you can explore someone’s flickr posted video. It’s an interesting interface, the slits expand to play a video:

But what is interesting is that if you use the blue buttons on the right or left to navigate in time, the next (or previous) videos will launch and play automatically, so you could just set this up and take a sample of people’s various videos from around the world, from drives in traffic or the train, to sunsets, to quirky sing alongs. I stumbled on a neat time lapse of a highway commute

They are rather variable in (ahem) cinematic quality, and is more a look at everyday life that people choose to share than being mini Sundance epics..

It appears the videos are plucked from the flickr clock group, and then put on the timeline:

Flickr Clock is an ongoing project that will collect member video and display it according to the (approximate) time that it was taken. As more members participate, we’ll have the opportunity to experience what a moment in time looks like from a diversity of perspectives.

Help us build a clock that celebrates the Flickrverse — in how, despite our borders or geography, we’re very much the same and uniquely different.

The time is posted via use of a “machine tag” to identify the time– first time I heard about machine tags that apparently provide hooks for doing third (or first in the case) party apps with flickr media (hey, just dream of this happening on stingy facebook) and woah, neo, there are ways to do wild card characters in these tags and related searches, what happy serendipity to find a new nugget of flickrness.

More on machine tags as it was announced in the flickr api discussion group (its a good sign when a web app can use itself to talk about itself):

“Machine tags” is the technical term for the extra hamsters we’ve added to the Flickr servers to formalize how these sorts of tags are treated. I’ve included a “Ceci n’est pas un FAQ” below with all the details.

For the moment, machine tags are principally an API “thing”. The photo pages have been updated to display tags a little differently but otherwise all the magic you can perform with machine tags happens here at the API layer. (This includes the special wildcard syntax for searching photos with machine tags.)

From my quick read, individuals can define their own machine tags to do whatever they want. This kind of thing could be explosive in the hands of a wizard like Tony Hirst… (ping ping rings the web doorbell).

After 5 years, flickr is still the best place in the web2iverse. Please Yahoo, stay in business!

If that is not confusing enough, my seven blog readers, then you must be skimming. Slow down and read.

In August I wrote about a different way to make a WordPress plugin (to the four remaining readers, do not gloss over, this is not a post about technology).

Joe Solomon had asked 10 educational bloggers to try out the Possibly Related Classroom Projects plugin. The plugin analyzes the text of a post, and appends links to 3 potentially relevant projects listed among the 14,000 plus ones at DonorsChoose.

DonorsChoose is a place where teachers from disadvantaged schools can post project ideas that need funding (small scale, classroom projects) for materials, with the idea that people willing to donate money can select a project that they would like to support.

I was skeptical, since a lot of what I write here seems to not have much relevance to school projects. But as I wrote in August, a post I wrote about my experience with “moo cards” linked me to three projects, that by title seemed far off, but as I read the project detail, was excited, especially one project for a school in Phoenix (Think Local) was asking for money to stimulate kids interest in reading by buying some classic story books, and one of the books listed was Click, Clack, Moo (and more great books on the project list like Where the Wild Things Are) and that ironically was a book I had just purchased for myself (and enjoyed, even at my supposed advanced age, see my level of literature is about 2nd grade).

This was too much serendipity– my blog post on moo cards to a project in Arizona for kids reading Click, Clack, Moo that I had just bought — I had to donate to the Literacy Pills project.

So back to yesterday. I get a somewhat thick packet in the mail from Donors Choose that is described in the letter as a “thank you package” from the teacher her students.

It includes a detailed one page Project Cost Report that shows exactly where the money went (to buy 17 books!), a chronological Fulfillment Report, that also shows the logistical support DonorsChoose provides- they review the proposal, verify material costs, and even orders them for the teacher.

But there is more.

The teacher who ran the project included an appreciative note:

… Your donation helped me pass on my love of reading to my students, who are at an age where they will learn to either love or hate reading. Thanks to your gift, many of my students love reading and contantly beg to take the books home every night!

When my students finish their work early, they often pick out a book to read. It should be noted that the books you donated are usually the first chosen. It’s a delight to see them so excited about reading some classic books that I myself read when I was young. Your donation fueled that excitement, and for that, I sincerely thank you. It thrills me to se that my students do not approach reading as a chore but as a delightful activity. Thank you for making this possible!

Wow, that is really something.

Yet there is more- part of the project funding including giving the teacher a (probably disposable) camera and DonorsChoose processes the photos which I get copies of in my thank-you package:

But wait, there is more, much more…

The envelope also includes hand written thank you notes from the students, and there, melt goes my heart reading them. I scanned a few into a PDF to share:

Student Letters (2.1Mb PDF)

Even if these were done as “Now let’s sit down and write letters before recess” they are still so precious and full of that honesty kids have when they are still wide-eyed and full of excitement and enthusiasm (before we school it out of them).

I am very touched.

Wow, do you think I am a bit motivated to give again to DonorsChoose?

You bet,

I gave, and I got, and am ready to give.

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