Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pask to the Future

2009; Athabasca University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.19173/irrodl.v10i1.681

1492-3831

Griff Richards,

Islamic Finance and Banking Studies

In 1979, I helped welcome the British cyberneticist, Gordon Pask, to Montréal.He stood out from the crowd, sporting a powder blue riding jacket, derby, and the mandatory English brolly.Over lunch, he animatedly expounded on his ideas of educational cybernetics, knocking the wine onto the table and his p-soup into his lap.After clearing the collateral damage, we carried on to the Concordia University TV studio to record his presentation on conversation theory.Whether due to the audience, the lights, or the lunch, the talk quickly disintegrated into a disjointed ramble and was never edited into a final program.Gordon stayed in Montréal for a few years, building prototypes of conversationally linked documents and sharing his philosophy of serialist versus holist learning styles in well-lubricated graduate seminars.Unfortunately, his ability to express his ideas was severely limited by the technology of the day, his confusing notational system, and the spirits of Montréal.So few comprehensive works emerged that Nigel Ford's book might well be valued as the best beginners' guide to Pask's ideas.