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papers, all of which are, in Bernard Scott's words (2001a, 2), “notoriously
difficult” to read. 18
Here, then, I will confine myself to a few comments. First, CASTE and its
descendants remained clearly within Musicolour's lineage. CASTE was an-
other aesthetically potent environment with which the student could inter-
act, exploring different routes around the entailment mesh appropriate to this
subject matter or that, being invited to carry out the relevant performative
exercises, with apparatus at the laboratory bench if relevant, responding to
queries from the machine, and so on. Again we find the performative epis-
temology that I have associated with cybernetics in the earlier chapters—of
articulated knowledge and understanding as part and parcel of a field of per-
formances. Thoughtsticker went so far as to interact with the subject-experts
who fed in the contents of entailment meshes—generalizing aspects of the
mesh in various ways, for example, and checking back about the acceptability
of these generalizations. In this version, the very content of the mesh was, to
a degree, a joint product of the human and the machine, as I said earlier about
a Musicolour performance.
Second, we can note that, again like Musicolour, Pask's teaching machines
also functioned as experimental setups for scientific research, now in the field
of educational psychology. Pask and his collaborators toured schools and col-
leges, including Henley Grammar School and the Architectural Association,
with the portable version of CASTE and made observations on how different
learners came to grips with them, echoing Pask's observations in the fifties
on Musicolour. These observations led him to distinguish two distinct styles
of learning—labeled “serial” and “holist” in relation to how people traveled
around the mesh—and to argue that different forms of pedagogy were ap-
propriate to each.
Third, we can return to the social basis of Pask's cybernetics. The very ease
with which one can skip from a general sense of “adaptation” to a specific
sense of “learning” as manifested in schools and universities suggests that
education, if anywhere, is a site at which cybernetics stood a good chance
of latching onto more mainstream institutions, and so it proved for Pask. In
1982, Pask and Susan Curran (1982, 164) recorded that “over a period of 11
years (five of overlapping projects and a six-year research project) the Social
Science Research Council in Britain supported a study by System Research . . .
on learning and knowledge.” Around the same time, Bernard Scott (1982, 480)
noted that “despite the painstaking way in which Pask prepared the ground
for the theory's presentation [conversation theory], it is fair to say that it has
not won general acceptance in psychology. The dominant attitudes were too
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