This Scanner Courses website is a small step towards bringing a big idea to life.
Over 10 years ago, while searching the internet for solutions to the problem of life, I followed a link and landed on Barbara Sher’s bulletin boards. There I discovered discussions about a kind of people who Barbara was calling Scanners.
She’d just published a book about them (Refuse to Choose) and she said they had multiple interests, like Leonardo da Vinci, and couldn’t focus on just one main thing the way our western culture expects people to. I knew immediately that I was one of them. It explained so much about my life.
Of course I then set out to find out more about Scanners, and I discovered that one of our main characteristics is a love of learning. Well, I already knew that about myself, but I hadn’t liked the way the formal education system put pressure on me to specialise at high school and university.
So I started thinking, wouldn’t it be great to have a Scanner university where you could study anything that interested you, and find all kinds of learning resources, and discuss everything with other people who had a similar diversity of interests and knowledge and ideas?
And there would be no exams and no need to ever graduate and stop learning.
I wrote about this idea now and again in my Scanner daybook in various degrees of elaboration, and maybe I mentioned it to a few people in passing. In my imagination it would become a worldwide organisation with many different components. There would be not only an online section, with courses and learning resources and discussion forums, but also actual campuses, laboratories, research stations, studios, seminar and project centres in different parts of the world.
Scanners could ramble from one to another as they pleased, doing, learning, researching and creating whatever interested them at the time.
Perhaps my first steps towards it were creating the Scanner Tribe website and blog, though I didn’t write many posts yet, and setting up the Scanner Tribe groups on Facebook and LinkedIn to help scanners get together and feel less isolated. And I did lots of brainstorming in Idea Parties in various places, and completed Barbara Sher’s last coach training program. But up until now I didn’t do much directly towards putting my big idea into action.
I don’t know whether that vision will ever be realised in it’s grandest form, or even get near to it. And probably it will keep on changing shape. But here is a very small and experimental beginning that I hope will lead to something bigger.
You can sign up to learn something interesting or useful, while at the same time you’ll be helping me develop it.
Skannie