Gordon Pask: Conversation Processes

"The theory was Conversation Theory. Conversation Theory is a relativist, constructivist theory. It derives from teaching and learning: learning is the quintessentially constructivist activity. In even the lowest level of Computer Aided Learning, where the student can choose from many different alternative routes and thus compose, in effect, his own (view of the) subject, one important question is what has been learned. (That this is now recognised as an ever critical question is due, no doubt, in part to the development of CAL.) The matter of testing what is known is always hard, and it is harder still with a machine. One technique is called "Teach Back". In Teach Back the student tells the teacher, in his own words, what he believes (eg) a topic to be-how he understands it. (In CASTE this was done through a special device known as the Modelling Facility, as well as in interview.) Teach Back is interactive and conversational, and, when extended from simply testing what has been learned about some pre-defined topic, becomes an immensely powerful technique. In this view, conversation, its generalization and abstraction, both as colloquially used and as a technical term in Conversation Theory, is a potential generator of novelty and of understandings (hence of worlds): and of communion. It is both medium and substance of drama. Conversation is an equivalent, an alternative statement (of the process) of design. It permits communication without coding and leaves meaning where I maintain it should be, with the communicators and not in their messages. Conversation is the basis. It is very powerful and it is very revolutionary . Rather like its author, the prof." (Ranulph Glanville: Robin McKinnon-Wood and Gordon Pask: a Lifelong Conversation).

Conversation Theory