Cybernetic Education: The History of the Future of Teaching Machines

Abstract

In 1950, Claude Shannon, “the father of information theory,” built a robotic mouse called Theseus that could navigate a puzzle box, the type of maze that behavioral psychologists had long used to train and test real mice. Built from electromechanical relays (used by his employer Bell Labs in the telephone system), Shannon's mouse would bump into the walls and sense its way to the “cheese,” a movable metallic goal. Demonstrating cybernetics’ interest in feedback loops, Theseus could be set back in the maze to find the cheese again without bumping into walls, and according to Shannon, this meant that the robot learned from experience. This keynote will explore cybernetics and its connection to behaviorism and to post-war theories of learning. It will use this history to examine how metaphors about machines that teach and learn remain pervasive in our understanding and our imagination of education technology.