I’m honoured to be contributing to the Digital Media and Learning project, an initiative supported by the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation. I’ll be blogging there about the implications of the web for learning and society, joining an exceptional cast of scholars like danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, Cathy Davidson, Howard Rheingold and many others.

My first blogpost, about serendipity (of course) and the rationale for exploring this human process with the aid of an unweildy physical analogue machine instead of a digital model in The Serendipity Engine, is up!

Here’s a peek:


I am obsessed with serendipity. It’s become an almost pathological fascination since 2009, when I was inspired by a happy confluence of what I was doing then, and something that bumped up against it. I’m curious about what serendipity is, how it can be predicted and the things that help facilitate it and hinder it. And, being a student of the social psychology of the web, I’m interested in how the digital space affects it.

Read on…