A way to organize #SerendipityMoments? The serendipity pod.
Maybe the next passage is recognizable: you are on a meeting and you meet someone who shares your passion. Till that moment you don’t know that person, but there’s a click straight away. Before you know, you talk nineteen to the dozen about your passion, challenges, successes and new discoveries. You inspire each other and he or her has something you’re just looking for. The meeting is successful!
That’s serendipity! Ronald van den Hoff calls it unexpected relevant meetings between people who don’t know each other, but do have much to offer. His Seats2meet grew out of it.
Research shows that there’s an increasing need to meet each other in real life, thanks to the booming of social media. Other research shows that the chance two people will start a talk declines in proportion as the distance between their both office is more than 30 metres.
Fore those reasons it’s an illusion to assume that a great number of teachers will connect, and share ideas, with teachers from other schools by existing ICT applications. The distance between them is too big for personal contact and a planned Hangout chat eliminates serendipity in advance.
But we won’t give up too soon. Because, despite of my doubt, it would be so great when teachers really could share ideas and learn from each other worldwide. After all, there’s more knowledge outside than inside schools these days.
In a few months we’ll start an experiment with researchers of the Open University in Heerlen (NL). An experiment with the so-called serendipity pod. We all know we start talks the most easily at the coffee machine. It’s easy and most of the time serendipitous. Therefor we are going to put a new coffee machine in my school. It’s a peculiarly machine, because it will take longer to fill our cup with delicious coffee than we used to. Next to the coffee machine there’s a huge screen provided with possibilities for speaking. Exactly the same coffee machine and screen will be placed in a school 150 km beyond.
From that moment on teachers in my school will meet their own colleague’s at the coffee machine ánd their colleague’s from the school 150 km beyond. We are very curious about what will happen then. Will they enter into a conversation? It seems likely. I expect even more than that. We will see!
The post A way to organize #SerendipityMoments? The serendipity pod. appeared first on Seats2meet.
