Gordon Pask

Cybernetics is the science or the art of manipulating defensible metaphors; showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence.

— Gordon Pask

Man is always aiming to achieve some goal and he is always looking for new goals.

— Gordon Pask

To summarize the matter, teaching systems ought to be conversational in form and so devised that strategies are matched to individual competence.

— Gordon Pask

Complex human learning is a concept involving communication between the participant in the learning process, who commonly occupy the roles of learner and teacher.

— Gordon Pask

Observers are men, animals, or machines able to learn about their environment and impelled to reduce their uncertainty about the events which occur in it, by dint of learning... [We] shall examine human observers who, because we have an inside understanding of their observational process, belong to a special category. For the moment, we shall not bother with HOW an observer learns, but will concentrate upon WHAT he learns about, i.e. what becomes more certain.

— Gordon Pask

By definition, a pair of inherently unmeasurable, non-stationary systems, are coupled to produce an inherently measurable stationary system.

— Gordon Pask

Development of an organism from a single germ cell into a multicellular entity is a self-organizing system from any point of view and I wish to contend that this self-organizing system is a subsystem of the self-organizing system called 'evolution'.

— Gordon Pask

Cybernetics offers a scientific approach to the cussedness of organisms, suggests how their behaviours can be catalysed and the mystique and rule of thumb banished.

— Gordon Pask

Since human beings are highly adaptable it may be possible for an individual with any sort of competence to learn, in the end, according to any teaching strategy. But the experiments show, very clearly indeed, that the rate, quality and durability of learning is crucially dependent upon whether or not the teaching strategy is of a sort that suits the individual

— Gordon Pask

[A serialist]... checks the relevance of the information entering his list by forming single predicate hypotheses .... A structure is built up in orderly stages.

— Gordon Pask

Serialists fall into difficulties if they fail to distinguish the wood from the trees and consequently try to assimilate masses of sparsely related irrelevant information

— Gordon Pask

Holists are distinguished from serialists in terms of the number of inferential statements they produce... It is possible to distinguish the serialist from the holist by a tendency, on the part of a serialist, to preserve the order of the programme presentation format which is absent in the holist. Presented with a holist programme the serialist is unable to preserve the complete order but he does manage to preserve sequentially arranged fragments.

— Gordon Pask

If cognitive processes can be realized in a general machine then it is possible to execute mental operations in artifacts that are not necessarily subject to the embarrassing spatio-temporal limitations and structural frailties of a biological processor.

— Gordon Pask

Given a realistically sized task (and assuming that he cannot already perform it), a student is unable to generate the required performance strategy all at once. Instead, he directs his attention to various facets or subtasks and musters subroutines that build up a performance strategy bit by bit. The process is carried out by a learning strategy which, in the free learning subject, may be innate or acquired and which, for the student, is imposed externally by a teacher or learning system.

— Gordon Pask

It is worth stressing that once the entailment structure for a subject matter is available, together with its task structure, these can be used to design any kind of course or curriculum.

— Gordon Pask

A computer that issues a rate demand for nil dollars and nil cents (and a notice to appear in court if you do not pay immediately) is not a maverick machine. It is a respectable and badly programmed computer... Mavericks are machines that embody theoretical principles or technical inventions which deviate from the mainstream of computer development, but are nevertheless of value.

— Gordon Pask

A [learning] style is a disposition to adopt one class of learning strategy.

— Gordon Pask

Consistency of the person's strategic preference across tests (and subject matters) is curiously high.

— Gordon Pask