Book Review: Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems: Computational and Cognitive Approaches to the Communication of Knowledge by Eitenne Wenger (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers)

Upon first encountering Etienne Wenger's book, "Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems: Computational and Cognitive Approaches to the Communication of Knowledge," I assumed that it was the sort of book that would serve only as a reference. To find out about the EXCHECK tutoring system, I would just look it up in the exhaustive subject index. To see what tutoring work Beverly Woolf had done, I would look up her name in the author index. But, upon further examination, Wenger's book was revealed to be a good introductory text, first laying out basic issues in Chapters 1 and 2, then covering systems from SCHOLAR and SOPHIE to GUIDON and ACTP in Chapters 3 through 13. Each review chapter ends with a summary and an excellent set of bibliographic notes, further reinforcing the utility of the book as a reference and introduction to the field. In addition, it became clear that the book had another facet. As John Seely Brown and James Greeno point out in the introduction, "... this book is no mere catalog of programs and techniques... he has also laid out a provocative framework for analyzing and comparing intelligent tutoring systems." This framework is presented in Chapters 14 through 20. Thus, Wenger's book serves three purposes: it acts as a reference, it provides a comprehensive introduction to intelligent tutoring systems, and it develops a coherent framework for thinking about issues in any intelligent system that must communicate its knowledge.