I was lucky enough to have been able to participate in one of Ewan McIntosh’s ‘inspiration’ seminars at LTS earlier this week. The theme of this particular session was ‘simplicity’. We watched a ‘TED’ talk by David Pogue, a journalist on the New York Times who argued that much of the technology we use is overcomplicated. There was much to reflect upon in this and from the discussions which followed and indeed many of the contributions were very thought-provoking.

So the million dollar question I suppose is this…can the concept of simplicity improve the teaching and learning in our schools. Certainly, with the challenges faced by education in this modern world such as globalisation, technological innovation and the rise of the so-called information society might there be a temptation to produce over-complicated solutions to these challenges when instead we could perhaps stand back and consider what we already have. Is the knowledge-based society really advanced through highly technical software engineering, or can its progress be best served by our creative use of existing tools such as GLOW together with the peer-assisted learning it can so easily encourage and facilitate? Much of today’s educational software seems to work on the assumption that more is better when it comes to using sophisticated graphics. However, the opposite is often closer to the truth, according to psychologist Richard Mayer who wrote that “One of the biggest problems I see in educational software is that it overloads the learner. We know from studies that humans can focus on only a few things at any one time, so it’s important to keep graphics simple and concise”.

So does having more choice actually further complicate a system which in places is positively groaning with innovation fatigue? Take science. In physics, for example, one measurement of just how simple a theory is is the number of free parameters involved. A theory with numerous adjustable free parameters is recognised as less desirable than one with fewer free parameters, and an important goal of physics is to posit theories with the minimum number of parameters required to explain the observations. Less complications. Simple, in fact.

Thinkers and scientists starting with the monk William of Ockham in the thirteenth century (hence the title of this post) and including Karl Popper, Elliot Sober, Richard Swinburne and even Einstein have all tried to distill the essence of just what exactly simplicity really means. Indeed, Einstein wrote “Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” The common message from all these folk comes across as make it simple, not simpler, or rather, simplistic.

Perhaps the desirable concept of simplicity is more effectively advanced by careful evaluation of existing solutions and approaches rather than constantly trying to re-invent the wheel. Let’s perhaps look at what we are under-utilising in the teaching and learning tools we have, rather than trying to devise new ones. Are we all using AiFL effectively for example? Very simple approaches involved with this, but so very effective when it comes to raising attainment. Maybe the question we should be asking in many cases is ‘should we’ instead of ‘can we’ when faced with the challenge of change.

And as a post-script…I’ve just written this post on Windows live writer which automatically posts into wordpress. Did I really need to download the software and use it when simply typing my post into my wordpress blog would have done the same job?  are the features in ‘live writer’ really useful  and are they really necessary ?   Discuss.