Clearly, I could engineer performance using prescribed methods. Yet, I also observed a great deal of learning and performing that was not engineered externally. I could engineer thinking and learning, but I didn't understand how either occurred. I had little insight into how learning occurred spontaneously. As I watched both younger and older learners, I became interested in how individuals made sense of their world, and how learning environments might become better aligned with the individual's sense-making efforts.
Frameworks are better for explaining than predicting.
My foray into open learning was not due to the compelling arguments about the flaws of behaviorism or the merits of cognitivism. It was a personal reaction to what I saw around me. I observed different and very powerful learning processes in my own child, and I knew little about them. The need to better understand seduced me into philosophical and psychological territory about which I was largely unaware. For me, this has become far more important than being able to predict or engineer.