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Gordon Pask was one of the founding fathers of cybernetics, the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary intellectual movement that sprang up after the Second World War. "The science of control and communication in the animal and the machine" was how it was defined by Norbert Wiener, the American mathematician who in the 1940s coined the name cybernetics, the "art of steersmanship", from the Greek word kubernetes. Pask's book An Approach to Cybernetics (1961) is still one of the most accessible introductions to the subject.
Pask was a rare man in other ways. He was an eccentric in the best sense; gifted and original as a scientist, artist and lyricist. He had an exceptionally productive career (several books and over 200 published papers). His many contributions are still being assimilated in psychology, educational technology, cybernetics and systems science.
The founders of cybernetics included biologists and neurologists, mathematicians and engineers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and economists. Many were world leaders in their fields (Wiener had helped develop the world's first computers in the 1940s). They recognized that many problems can only be solved by interdisciplinary working, and sought to establish a common language and a shared set of principles for understanding the organization of complex systems.
In many ways they were successful. Cybernetic concepts such as flow of information, control by feedback, adaptation, learning and self-organization have permeated many disciplines, especially those concerned with natural and artificial complex systems. By the 1960s, there was a conservative backlash against cybernetics. Many thought its claims too grandiose and did not share the vision of the need for a new synthesis. Some scientists played safe, borrowing the ideas but not using the name. Daughter disciplines have developed: artificial intelligence, systems science, cognitive science, the new sciences of chaos, complexity and artificial life. At times, the new disciplines have overshadowed or forgotten their parent.
Gordon Pask was, by nature, a transdisciplinary, holistic thinker. He always held true to Wiener's original vision and remained committed to cybernetics as a unifying discipline.
His major work was the development of Conversation Theory, with applications in education (the two...