What Does Simple Mean?

Passive Learning is unchallenging and boring.  Active Learning has style and each person's Active Learning Style is unique.


Competency is our ever present goal.  A commonly repeated guideline when things get tough and learning gets hard is, "Keep it simple".   The way to keep things simple, however, may not always be that simple to find.  What is simple for one person may not be simple for another.  What seems simple at a distance may not seem simple close up.  Or the first step may be simple but suddenly the path may not be so simple, once you get halfway down the road.


It is more natural for some people to work from complex to simple and for other people it is more natural to work from simple to complex.  In the world today there is a notion that all complexity can, in fact, be reduced to digital simplicity.  Can the universe itself be entirely represented digitally and digitally reproduced to the last bit? Or is there a complexity in the nature of certain relationships that is ever new and living and that can never be completely known, only learned?  Is there a simplicity that in the end is not found in reductionism but in creativity?

Why Do We Frame Things?

Why do we frame things?  Often because we want to remember them.  We frame special moments in our minds.  Often, we frame our thoughts.  We frame special moments in our experience. Sometimes we quickly take our camera and seek and frame a special moment, event or action in the viewfinder and snap a picture of it.  We also frame what we need to learn when we want to learn something.  

When we frame something we are beginning a process of focusing on something.  We are drawing a line, a frame, around what we will take into consideration, and we are framing out what we will not take into consideration.  This enables us to identify and clarify a subject.  If we want to focus narrowly on a subject we will frame the subject accordingly, framing in what we think is a meaningful background to the subject and framing out what we do not think will help us focus on the subject in the way that we want to.  If we want to focus on a wider subject we will frame our subject in a different way.  If we want to frame a bigger picture, we will frame in a whole field of view and will not focus in on something in a way that creates a sharp distinction between foreground and background.

If we frame what we need to learn for our own personal needs we might find that we are framing them widely but then when wanting to express what we have learned to others find that we are framing the same things narrowly.  On the other hand, we might have our thoughts about what we have learned framed very narrowly but find other people are wanting us to frame the same thoughts much more widely when we try to talk to them about them.  These are examples of how we are regularly involved in framing things.