About Icanology

Icanology is a web-based learning community where people can capture, honor, assess, and archive competencies of all kinds.

Imagine icans, “I can count to 100.” “I can demonstrate the sales process in a retail store.” “I can describe hierarchy as a systems process.”

Imagine that anyone can write, earn, and endorse an ican. Imagine linking resources and then rating and commenting on the resources.

Imagine creating your icanography, your web-based, continually-updated resume.

Then imagine creating icanographs, or maps, of icans. Icanographs of careers, subjects, job descriptions, grade levels, hobbies, associations, certifications, etc.

It’s so simple and quite elegant. What we have learned and what we need to learn becomes transparent. Grades and testing seem obscure and obsolete. Resumes seem one-way, one-dimensional, and static.

I envision icanology as a positive, joyful lifelong system that can reform education from the ground up.

The Back Story

For years I have said that school should be on a merit badge system like Boy and Girl Scouts.

I studied under Bela Banathy, Sr. who wrote A Systems View of Education. I volunteered and worked in schools. I witnessed how wonderful children with wonderful teachers still fall behind. I co-founded the Paia Youth and Cultural Center. I I became a business and life coach. I experienced how school can’t possibly teach us even a small part of what we all have to continually learn in our complex lives.

The day after the Obama election I woke with a full-blown, simple new system for learning and education. I visualized a wiki-type system of learning benchmarks that are socially-networked and peer-created. I thought that, surely, someone had done this already. I began to search sites, blogs, and twitters and found nothing like it.

After six weeks of volunteering on the Obama campaign in Ohio, I realized that this system needed to be based on the ground, in community, not just on the web. I began to describe it to people and they loved it.

I put up a blog site called “Lynn’s Big Idea.” With the help of 15 people, particularly David Fisher and Patty Inman, I submitted a federal Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research proposal. We were turned down.

Now

Looking back, it was a good thing. I’ve managed to scrounge up help and I’ve had the time to learn. We—Syd Smith, Chris Reickert, and I–are building it from scratch right here in Makawao.

The prototype/beta version should be up to play with by November 12, a year after its conception.

Now we’re looking for strategic partners. We’re looking for people and organizations who see that icanology is the wave of the future, who want to get on the ground floor of a very exciting new way of reaching and inspiring their constituents and, at the same time, create a system that can joyfully and respectfully evolve our schools.

Please let me know what you think!

Aloha,

Lynn Rasmussen