Pask, Conversational Theory & Generative AI

An often forgotten learning theorist, who needs to be revisited in the light of Generative, conversational AI, is Gordon Pask (1928 – 96). His work on learning machines and conversational theory, although reaching back to the 1950s, has turned out to be both prophetic and useful. 

Known as the ‘Dandy of Cybernetics’ he was famously mannered, theatrical, intense and eccentric. With his cape, Edwardian suit, bow-tie and pipe, he was known as being difficult to communicate with, his lectures and writing often difficult to comprehend. Both an academic and entrepreneur (largely unsuccessful) he liked the freedom to build and experiment and valued his autonomy. 

 

Nevertheless, he was an original thinker who has made a significant contribution to thinking about the complexity of learning. A polymath interested in geology, engineering, art, theatre, sculpture, biological computing, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, logic, linguistics, psychology music, cybernetics and education, he saw learning as a complex process of interaction.

 

Well aware of Artificial Intelligence, he was a friend of Marvin Minsky and would stay with him in the US, although he was critical of the AI community’s tendency to focus on isolated systems, separate from human interaction. As AI has widened out into language models and become part of the global system of learning, Pask has come back into focus, with his sophisticated theories of learning through conversation.

 

Learning machines

Like Pressey and Skinner before him, he developed a number of learning machines. The difference was in seeing machines as things we converse with, rather than use as tools. In this sense he was closer to Pressey than Skinner. Eucrates, for example, not only taught but could adapt its teaching based on knowledge of the learner. There is physical feedback, and the machine builds a model of user behavior. He drew upon Wittgenstein’s idea of meaning as use. This is in stark contrast to Skinner’s behaviourist reward machines.

 

Developed in the 1953s, he invented Musicolour, a system of interaction between performer and system that allowed a light show to be triggered by a musician. It could amplify a performance, even become ‘bored’ by the musician’s repetition! It went on tour around Music Halls in England and was interaction as performance.

 

A more practical learning machine was SAKI (Self-Adaptive Keyboard Instructor), built in 1956, to teach punch-card operators, with electric wires that cued the learner, detected keypresses and time intervals, always pushing the learner ahead but not too far ahead, to keep the learner motivated. It focused on the intense and fruitful interaction between learner and machine. It was still in use in the UK Post Office in the late 1960s.

 

Ecogame, developed in 1969, a management training game, had some success being bought by IBM. Targeted at business and political leadership, it was based on his ideas of self-organized, interactive learning in a simulated process and environment.

 

His teleprinter trainer caste CASTE, which stood for Course Assembly System and Tutorial Environment, was the size of a small room, built in 1972. It was an early adaptive learning system based on his learning theory. CASTE had an Entailment Structure or topic map to provide an overview, a Communications Module on a computer terminal, BOSS ( Belief and Opinion Sampling System) and a modelling system that would present learning and assessment tasks. Systems were designed for students with tutorial algorithms, to spot failure and reassess on lower levels of learning. It offered a range of choices to the learner. 

 

Thoughtsticker, built around the same time, used entailment meshes, was a hierarchical representation of knowledge. It originally had a set of pigeon holes with paper notes, later developed into an adaptive system that allowed users to move upwards on an entailment mesh of concepts. You could study it through a mesh of concepts with different perspectives. The learner would feed in concepts and the interconnections would be shown. A small computer was later used. It could also jump with was conditional hyperlinking. It was ahead of its time, unfortunately it was also mired in learning styles theory.

In all of this development and experimentation he was trying to implement his theory of learning - conversation theory. Teaching and learning were fundamentally conversations fo Pask, even when they involved technology.

 

Conversation theory

Pask studied learning through conversation, looking for identifiable features processes. Meaning is agreed use in the context of a conversation. This is not a fixed exchange of propositions but an exchange that shapes the thinking and learning of both parties. We may agree, disagree, modify beliefs, even change our minds but we gain from the conversation. Learners and teachers move through knowledge changing perspectives and levels. This, for Pask was the essence of learning. He sees conversation and learning as something active, in use, as we deal with the world. Conversation is also the link or knowledge we have with others, that they exist, like us. Conversation for Pask is at the root of everything we do, perception, emotional engagement and language. This is a much subtler idea than just verbal conversation. 

We learn together and are always using artefacts to learn and communicate. A conversation can be several different types, as an individual, two people, a group of people or combination of people and technology. Proximity is not the point, as technology destroys distance. This is a general conversational theory that sees people, their social interactions and technology as one.

Conversational theory saw learning as taking place in a learning environments, where we had sophisticated encounters with that environment, to it and back from it. We learn, Pask thought, by interacting, or having ‘conversations’, with people and our environment, including gestures, pictorial, with media and with and through machines. In that sense ‘conversation’ is almost metaphorical. We interact with the world in a way that is very much like ‘conversation’ in language.

At one level, teacher and learner can engage in a strict conversation, with interactions on two levels – how (teacher demonstrates) and learner does and why (explains) at the conceptual level. Pask saw that we engage in hierarchies of conversation but not in some simplistic Bloom hierarchy, we flit between levels. What he called styles of teaching or learning are like Wittgenstein’s language games, contextually different forms of conversation.

 

His learning theory saw conversation as the essential learning process. He studied conversations separately from the content of conversations to explore their processes and limits. Learning conversations are, and should be, open, complex and dynamic, not a clumsy, didactic movement toward a final truth. Variety, a plurality of ideas, perspectives and conversations matters, where learning emerges from the process of conversation.

 

Learning needs to provoked by a teacher and constructed by the learner and although Pask is rarely seen as a serious social constructivist, he did a lot of work, unlike most constructivists, on exactly how he though learners constructed knowledge and pragmatic skills. Importantly, he was sensitive to learning by doing and practical skills as well as knowledge.

 

In Conversation, cognition and learning (1975) he outlined the complexity of conversation, especially in learning, with hierarchical branching and loops, agreement, understanding, along with analogies and generalisations. Concepts are refined, expanded, altered, generalised, applied, related by analogy in the process of learning. This is not just dry rationalism, as for Pask to think is to feel, mind and body intertwined. He was keenly aware of our evolutionary legacy as biological beings. Conversation is how we think, and to teach and learn we must reproduce the process that evolution has bequeathed us. He had drawn from Vygotsky, the idea of a social being having developed throughout childhood, although Pask's focus was less on language, more on a wider social context.

 

Entailment meshes

Entailment meshes attempt to capture thought processes, with topics related to each other and grouped into relations, such as ‘analogies’ and ‘coherences’, that comprise concepts, which we share. We are the active constructers of concepts, making new finer distinctions, seeing similarities and differences, generalised, realised through action and interaction. All of this takes place naturally, we are conversational beings and have no choice in the matter. Conversation is an on-going, dynamic process, part of our being.

 

This is a radical departure from the database driven model that drove AI for so long, one of retrieval. We now interact with the world to learn through conversation. These conversations can be varied as they must suit the progress of the learner, not be pre-determined by too few constricting rules. He thought that most learning technology was hopelessly primitive in teaching and learning as they failed to recognise conversation as the means by which we learn. 

In learning there also has to be a contract to learn, common ground and action for successful learning, a process that is honest about contradictions, conflict, epiphanies and resolutions in the learning process. It is an agreed context.

Once a domain has been mapped out, one can also record the learner’s vectors through content, the routes taken, nodes reached. This is the sort of personalisation realised by modern adaptive systems and now generative AI, that can deliver the sort of sophisticated dialogue that Pask envisaged.

 

Interactions of actors

Pask and Gerard de Zeeuw took conversation theory one step further with the ‘Interactions of actors’ theory, where the scope was widened to include three or more actors in conversation, across time, entering and leaving such conversations. Here the defined process had knots, links, braids and a logic of the conversational and learning process but this is often metaphorical and lacks the complexity that AI models now have in capturing language. Rather then designing such a logic of process, AI learns from language and its use in Large Language Models, where the training data set is enormous. It is therefore empirically much more useful and representative of the reality of language use.

 

Generative AI

Conversations go on over time and become the culture, so LLMs capture many conversations. Conversations are captured as culture. So rather than constructing huge logic trees and cumbersome Paskian machines, Generative AI seems to deliver the richness of topics and language that allows it to deliver at least some of the conversational complexity that Pask thought was essential for learning. It already holds the relationships of words and phrases to each other by being trained in an unsupervised way, with a vast corpus of text, then further supervised training using RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) and PPO (Proximal Policy Optimisation). Pask even talked about evil as the limits of the rights of actors to interact or hold conversation, prefiguring alignment and guard-railing.

 

The next stage is to provide some conversational structures to the dialogue that allow efficient learning to take place. This is precisely what is happening with Khanmigo, where structured feedback and encouragement adds motivational and useful feedback to the on-going learning conversation. Pask would have been delighted at the emergence of this type of learning system using Generative AI. 

 

Interaction is still primitive with computers, and we may have just seen a more conversational model emerge, where conversation, let’s call it on-going prompting, is replacing search and retrieval or request systems. Systems are becoming conversational, whether reading/writing or oral/aural and therefore more human. The technology must become more aware of people's needsto have more fruitful conversations. Conversations encapsulate interests, the seeking and learning process. They reveal intention.

 

The word ‘conversation’ may seem odd in the case of LLMs, as it lies beyond the idea of discrete individuals and stored knowledge into massive and sophisticated models with billions of parameters trained on unimaginably large sets of training data. But our interactions with these systems are certainly conversational, as learning is a process not an event. Pask realised that despite the radically different way these models work, they are still entities within a conversation with humans. The biological and technical are not separate but entwined in a single conversational system.

 

Conclusion

We would do well to pay more attention to learning through Pask’s conversational theory, with more empirical work on what works well in the context of increasing capability on the machine side through AI. Improvements that take the learning process into real conversations with structures that both allow for complexity but also guide towards outcomes, is now badly needed. This is what will give us useful, massively beneficial, teaching and learning. Let’s call them conversational systems, even a Universal Teacher.

Bibliography

Pask, G. (1961). [1968]. An approach to cybernetics. Hutchinson. 

Pask, G. (1962). a proposed evolutionary model. in H. von Foerster & G. W. J. Zopf (Eds.), Principles of self-organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois symposium on self-organization, Robert Allerton Park, 8 and 9 June 1960 (pp. 229–254). Pergamon Press. 

Pask, G. (1966). Men, machines and the control of learning. Educational Technology, 6(22), 1–12. 

Pask, G. (1968). a cybernetic model for some types of learning and mentation. in H. l. oestreicher & d. r. Moore (Eds.), Cybernetic problems in bionics (pp. 531–586). Gordon and Breach science Publishers. 

Pask, G. (1975). Conversation, cognition and learning: A cybernetic theory and methodology. Elsevier. 

Pask, G. (1975). The cybernetics of human learning and performance: A guide to theory and research. Hutchinson Educational. 

Pask, G. (1976). Conversation theory: Applications in education and epistemology. Elsevier.

Pask, G., & Curran, s. (1982). Microman: Living and growing with computers. Century Publising Co. 

Pask, G., & Kopstein, F. F. (1977). teaching machines revisited in the light of conversation theory. Educational Technology, 17(10), 38–41. 

Pask, G., & von Foerster, H. (1960). A predictive model for self-organizing systems.