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was being driven by the human and which by Eucrates. It was impossible. The
behaviour of the two elements was converging, and each was moving towards
the other” (S. Beer 2001, 552).
Teaching Machines
The machines we have discussed so far—Musicolour, SAKI, Eucrates—were
all directly concerned with performance and nonverbal skills. In the 1970s,
however, Pask turned his attention to education more generally and to ma-
chines that could support and foster the transmission of representational
knowledge. CASTE (for Course Assembly System and Tutorial Environment)
was the first example of such a machine, constructed in the early 1970s by
Pask and Bernard Scott (who completed a PhD with Pask at Brunel University
in 1976; see fig. 7.8). Figure 7.9 shows a more sophisticated version, Thought-
sticker, from around 1977.
17
There is no doubt that Pask was extremely interested in these machines
and the overall project in which they served as markers, or of their worldly
Figure 7.8.
intuition, a portable version of caste. source: g. Pask, “conversa-
tional techniques in the study and Practice of education,”
British Journal of
Educational Psychology, 46
(1976), 24, fig. 3. (reproduced with permission from the
British Journal of Educational Psychology
.
©
the british Psychologcial society.)
