ELF: The Electronic Learning Facilitator

As the world-wide computer network becomes ubiquitous, new tools have been developed, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), for the delivery of multimedia hypertext-based documents. Similarly, there has been an explosion in the amount of email, bulletin boards, and Usenet News available. This has led to the major problem of information overload. We are slowly but surely being overwhelmed by the amount of information available to us. To address this problem, the New Technology Initiative (NTI) of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is funding the ELF project over a period of two years to develop a tool, the Electronic Learning Facilitator. This tool is aimed at assisting learners to make effective use of the information available. The ELF project started in December of 1993, with the goal of producing a tool for installation in UK academic sites. This paper will first discuss the new networked information sources that are appearing around the globe, and then analyse the requirements of learners for accessing this information. From the requirements, the paper will show the desirable features of an ELF, such as monitoring the user at work to gain hints as to what the user is doing, being guided by the user directly, and utilising information gathered from other ELFs, or from monitoring the various information sources for announcements of new services, updates of information, etc. The main body of the paper will illustrate the current progress on the project, outlining the implementation of the ELF. ELF is written using various high-level languages such as the Tool Command Language (TCL) and Perl, as well as the more traditional C++. It consists of various agents, each agent having a specific task to perform, such as monitoring a WWW site for any new documents, or monitoring a Usenet Newsgroup for articles that might be of particular interest to the owner of the agent. Finally the paper will report on our plans to test users on a prototype.