Facts About Serendip

Born in 1994

First website on Bryn Mawr College campus

Hosted the Bryn Mawr College website, c. 1995-96

Hosted the College Library's first website

Over 3 million unique visitors in 2006

More than 21,000 pages

Averages more than 20,000 unique visitors per day

More than 99% of its visitors are from off-campus

Home of Center for Science in Society, 2001 - present

Hosted College Diversity Conversations, c. 2004-06

Most popular exhibit:
Mind and Body: Rene Descartes to William James
translated into Spanish and Russian

Significant exhibits from the last several years:
Serendip's Exchange (2006- present)
Ant Colonies: Social Organization Without a Director (2006)
Exploring Emergence: The World of Langton’s Ant (2005)
Education and Technology: Serendip's Experiences 1994-2004
Thinking About Segregation and Integration (2003)

Hosted the first Bryn Mawr College undergraduate course to welcome alumnae into online discussion with current students (2007)

Notable Annual Milestones:

2007:

Serendip's new materials are now created in a Content Management System (CMS), Drupal, which extends Serendip's interactivity and functionality in significant ways. Almost all pages may be appended with comments from any visitor from the web, and Serendip automatically analyzes its own content and generates related links to relevant material.

Serendip publishes an expanded collection of hands-on activities for teaching biology to middle school or high school students, a project of Dr. Ingrid Waldron, faculty member in the Biology Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues. There are now 23 interactive activities, and its home page averages 400 visitors/day. The most popular downloads are currently Is Yeast Alive and Mitosis and Meiosis. The collection is the first search result in Google for the terms, teaching biology.

Serendip offers blog technology to K-12 teachers attending summer institutes.

Serendip hosts the first Bryn Mawr College undergraduate course to welcome alumnae into online discussion with current students.

2006: Serendip surpasses 3 million unique visitors in 2006.

Serendip becomes yet more expansive in its outreach, publishing articles by and conversations with scholars in art history, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, writing, geology and philosophy, among others. Interacting with and publishing Serendip readers' stories grows, and storytelling across the humanities and sciences, as well as storytelling as a biological process is a major focus.

Getting it Less Wrong evolves, and is quoted in the New York Times, among other places on the web.

Serendip continues to develop partnerships with two arts organizations, the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. Among several Wilma productions, Serendip offers an online forum for Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and Paul Grobstein is a panelist in a Wilma discussion series centered around the play.

2005: Serendip partners with Alice Lesnick (Education) at Bryn Mawr College to publish an online book developed in an undergraduate Education course, Empowering Learners: A Handbook for the Theory and Practice of Extra-Classroom Teaching.

A sampling of university courses around the world which use Serendip materials is compiled.

Serendip surpasses 2 million unique visitors in 2005.

2004: Serendip hosts The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity, an undergraduate course taught by Anne Dalke (English) and Paul Grobstein (Biology) at Bryn Mawr College, the first undergraduate course that we are aware of that could be taken for English or Biology credit.

Serendip publishes Writing Descartes: I Am, and I Can Think, Therefore ... , an essay by Paul Grobstein and an ongoing experiment in story sharing and story evolution among many colleagues.

Serendip surpasses 1 million unique visitors in 2004.

2003: Serendip's Home Page changes to suggest different ways to navigate through Serendip's more than 10,000 pages in a non-hierarchical fashion.

In teacher workshops, Philadelphia-area teachers were encouraged to create their own web pages in the "experimental sandbox," using wiki technology.

Serendip partners with Ray McDermott (Stanford) and Herve Varenne (Columbia) to publish an online version of Culture as Disability supplemented by online discussion.