Book review: Knowledge Negotiation Edited by Rod Moyse and Mark Elsom-Cook (Academic Press, 1992)

This book deals with communication processes between students and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that iteratively adjust the content and manner of presentation. The book is somewhat of a sequel to the book "Guided Discovery Tutoring" edited by Elsom-Cook in 1990. Knowledge negotiation is seen as necessary for guided discovery. Knowledge negotiation encompasses the processing of the dialog between the system as guide and the student as explorer while both pursue their agendas. The editors have selected authors from Europe and Canada to explore different facets of the concept of knowledge negotiation. The book takes a deeper look at some issues of knowledge communication between student and tutoring systems from Wenger [1987], viewing the issue as negotiation processes, both implicit and explicit. A pervasive goal of the prototype and preprototype educational systems described is to design human-machine interfaces that do not treat people autocratically.