Life is not really so difficult if you just follow the instructions.

On the Occasion of Serendip's 10th Anniversary: A Conversation in Search of a Sentence Dixon/Dalke A dialogue arising out of Writing Descartes...

Building Two-Way Bridges: A Conversation about Gender and Science

Serendip's original "welcome" statement explained that

Dixon's additions to this "mission statement" included her conviction that the "center" of Serendip is its playground, and her current understanding that the site, as a whole, is "about incompleteness."

In response to Dixon's observations, Dalke offered a connection between a) and b): because life and our understanding of it is always incomplete, the best way to "go about it" is

to create in our classrooms and on-line spaces of structured play where, if deliberative self-censure happens less frequently, we might arrive at some unexpected places, worth examining....where the process and productivity of ongoing and ever-revisable conversation...becomes an open and constantly edited record both of the conversations we are having with one another and those we are conducting with ourselves, within our own heads...giving many of us a profound sense-and a record--of ourselves as thinking, re-thinking, ever-revisable beings. The Grace of Revision, the Profit of "Unconscious Cerebration," or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play.

(Characteristically,) Dalke also offered, along with the essay on "revision," above, pages (and pages) of shared exploration of what Serendip is "about," in the form of five dialogues: with Emily Madsen, Anneliese Butler and Elizabeth Catanese (Bryn Mawr students who have participated in Serendip's forums), Paul Burgmayer (a high school math teacher who was certified in Bryn Mawr's Education Program), and Wil Franklin (a Bryn Mawr Biology Lab Instructor).

• A Conversation about Changing Community-- and Changing Ourselves
• Learning to Say "I"... As We Step Into and Out of Dialogue with One Another
• A Serious Playground: The Practical Use-Value of Serendip's Web Forums
• An Effort in Collaboration": Immediacy and the Slowness of Time
• Independent Agents Acting to Find a New Pattern

She pulled in, too, reflections generated this summer in the Working Group on Information:

to a human story-teller, information is something that changes in a story the degree of uncertainty about something....There is no "information" unless there is such a change (information is not an intrinsic property of anything; it is fundamentally relational).

"Squeezing" down all this "expansion," Dalke offered a (trial) sentence:

Conceived with an awareness that life is not a closed system, Serendip is a website that explores the pleasures and productivity of incompleteness, by facilitating connections among ever-expanding numbers of contributors.