I was reminded of this quote today:

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826); 3rd president of US.

The reason it came to mind was that while thinking about apparent serendipity, an alternative perception occurred to me which might best be summed up by a paraphrasing of the above quote as follows:

“I’m a great believer in serendipity, and I find the more connected I become the more frequently it occurs.”

While reading one of my favourite language blogs I was referred to a site entitled The Mnemosyne Project which aims, not only to provide a sophisticated free flash-card tool, but also to research into the nature of long-term memory. A few seconds earlier, I had been referred by Ewan McIntosh to Quizlet - another free vocabulary training tool. Both seem very impressive.

However, something about the url of The Mnemosyne Project rang a bell, and it soon came to me that it appears to be the work of the same talented, open-handed people who offer the free audio editing & recording program, Audacity.

Audacity is loaded on many PCs in East Lothian schools. It was that program which I used to extract, amplify, bass boost and eventually fade out the short mp3 sample in this post. It sounds like a lot, but it was the work of seconds really.

I would imagine that any organisation offering this much to learning communities of whatever kind should be eligible for an award of some kind, at some point. Any ideas?

Categories: Behind-the-scenes, Digital Literacy, Languages, Music, Technology