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Well, it made me laugh. I was in the middle of thinking and writing s guessed at model based on systems engineering of the sort that Microsoft would use. They are just arrogant enough to think they are in the `education' business adapting the hivemind to their products...which of course they are...and doing a pretty good job, sorry to say.
Then I read the exchange between you and Jeffery Fisher and looked up the link. Educational psychology from the 40s. Hilarious. That was the era when the military mind set prevailed. So they used these techniques to train military personnel for the mass military machine. Something like this systems mind set had taken over the education I went through as a kid.
Industrialized educational psychology, RAND and the whole Sputnik era applied ... well to close the mind shaft gap! Check out the closing scene in Dr Strangelove who was my archetype systems engineer application for humans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPJn0QJPaoc&feature=related
I saw this movie in one of then new mall movie complexes out in the San Fernando Valley when it first came out. I was twenty-one, I think. I was about the only one in the audience laughing. By the end a mostly young audience had walked out.
It really got to me how most of the audience could not see their world was parodied. It was a pretty sick moment. The location was important because many of the better jobs out in the Valley were military related, aircraft, electronics, and other `high' tech engineering stuff. These were the kids from those families. We were the spawn of early military industrial complex.
CG