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 I am still enjoying using Serendip to both post ideas and questions stirred up from class discussions and readings and especially in posting our papers. I love having the opportunity to use more that words to convey the mood and message of my paper, and Serendip is the perfect canvas for this. From what I read of other's evaluations, Serendip and the smaller discussions seem to be working well for the class as a whole. Personally I feel that our Tuesday discussions need work. Maybe its just because I'm used to being in a smaller class with Anne, but I feel like there is too much lecturing and just waiting for people to speak up. I want to be able to hear from people in the other group. Maybe its because it is a larger group or because sometimes our conversations are abstract, but its okay to say something that not everyone might agree with. As we have learned, there is no one story that is the pinnacle of truth. 

In this class I feel that I personally am having trouble connecting to the readings. I liked reading Darwin and Dennett and looking at their stories and theories, but I didn't feel an urge to keep reading because I was engrossed. And again I am having the same problem with Powers. Perhaps I am coming into the reading with expectations, I don't know what it is. Something to work on personally… I always get more out of the discussions about the ideas than the actual readings of them, but I feel that if I could get even more out of the discussions if I could become more engrossed in the actual reading process. I also wish that we had more of a conversation going on in our Serendip posts. Sure you don't have to respond to someone else's posts all the time, but I like then it becomes more than a one comment thread and evolves into an actual dialogue. More interesting ideas come up that way. 

I'm definitely still learning, looking at evolution more as an evolution itself rather than a strict algorithm or scientific recipe that a group of scientists jotted down decades ago. I still want to explore the idea of new or original thought and something mentioned in Generosity- the actually limited number of scripted story plots that authors follow. Is that accurate? Like the Library of Babel, how much is already out there and how much has yet to be determined?