This volume presents the written versions of talks delivered at the symposium "The advent of AI in Higher Education" held in Prague, Czechoslovakia, October 23-25, 1989. Contributions review the current impact of AI on the educational process, stressing the problems and needs of universities. Particular systems, projects and methodologies are de scribed with the aim of gathering and generalizing the experience obtained. The latest developments prove that AI offers interesting methods which could be used with success across a wider range in the domain of education. The nature and spirit of AI forms a new phenomenon which necessitates reconsidering the whole educational process. Papers in this volume describe sophisticated tutoring systems as well as suggestions for new curricula.

What does it mean for a student to come to an understanding of a philosophical standpoint and can the explosion of resources now available on the web support this process, or is it inclined instead to create more confusion? We believe that a possible answer to the problem of finding a means through the morass of information on the web to the philosophical insights it conceals lies in the process of narrative pathway generation. That is, the active linking of resources into a learning path that contextualizes them with respect to one another. This result can be achieved only if the content of the resources is indexed, not just their status as a text document, an image or a video. To this aim, we propose a formal conceptualization of the domain of philosophy, an ontology that would allow the categorization of resources according to a series of pre-agreed content descriptors. Within an e-learning scenario, a teacher could use a tool comprising such an ontology to annotate at various levels of granularity available philosophical materials, and let the students explore this semantic space in an unsupervised manner, according to pre-defined narrative pathways.