Gordon Pask

I came across the ideas of Gordon Pask while researching reflection theory, relating to reflective dialogue.

Andrew Gordon Speedie-Pask, cybernetician, producer for the stage and lyricist, born June 28, 1928; died March 29, 1996.

http://tip.psychology.org/pask.html
The Conversation Theory developed by G. Pask originated from a cybernetics framework and attempts to explain learning in both living organisms and machines. The fundamental idea of the theory was that learning occurs through conversations about a subject matter which serve to make knowledge explicit
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Pask identified two different types of learning strategies: serialists who progress through an entailment structure in a sequential fashion and holists who look for higher order relations.

http://www.pangaro.com/Pask-Archive/guardian-obit.html
Gordon Pask, who has died aged 67, spent his life developing an elegant theory of learning that stands without peer. His achievement was to establish a unifying framework that subsumes the subjectivity of human experience and the objectivity of scientific tradition. Sponsored by governments and industries on both sides of the Atlantic, his life-long research spanned biological computing, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, logic, linguistics, psychology, and artificial life. His was an original approach to age-old questions of how the human organism learns from its environment and relates to others through language.


http://artsci-ccwin.concordia.ca/edtech/ETEC606/paskboyd.html

Conversation Theory (CT) in a Nutshell

A "P-individual" (= participant) originates (by internal conversation) a conceptual procedure which when "applied" (i.e. executed) produces a representation or an action. Another P-individual tries to do the same, if the representations or actions that they produce and display in shared space, are regarded by each other to be about the same, then an agreement has been reached, and the agreed concept can be given one label which both participants can confidently use in further conversation. If however, the productions differ, then the participants need to exhibit the ways in which they are executing their concepts in order to establish a distinction between the two. At this point they become able to assign two different agreed labels. In which case each participant gains a new concept. There is however in CT, a strange recursion underlying such conversational learning, because the participants themselves are taken to be no more than emergents from previous conversational agreements, all executing in some informationally coupled M-individuals (= biological-bodies &/or machines). (See also: Glanville, "Pask a Slight Primer", (1993).