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 a major problem of information overload: we are slowly but surely being overwhelmed by the amount of information available to us

Kilgour, A.

Kirby, R.

Mayes, J. T.

McAndrew, R

Taylor, H.

English

R. Kirby

R McAndrew

A. Kilgour

H. Taylor

J. T. Mayes

Crossref

ELF:
the Electronic Learning Facilitator
R. Kirby, R McAndrew, A. Kilgour, H. Taylor and J. T. Mayes
ICBL, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
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 a 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 1993, with the goal of producing
a tool for installation in UK academic sites.
This paper first discusses the new networked information sources that are appearing around the
globe, and then analyses the requirements of learners for accessing this information. From the
requirements, the paper shows the desirable features of an ELF, such as monitoring the user at
work to gain hints as to what he or she is doing, being guided by the user directly, and using
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 illustrates 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 reports on our plans to test users on a prototype.
Introduction
Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in the use of the Internet and other
69
R KJrby et al. ELF: the Electronic Learning Facilitator
global networks of computers. We have seen estimates of between 100,000 and 1,000,000
new users each month joining the Internet. Predominantly these are information seekers,
but the figures do also represent a significant increase in the number of information
providers. For learners, we now have a significant set of information sources, albeit
obscured by a lot of noise.
There are many different types of information sources now available, all with varying
attributes. For many years, the Internet has provided email. For learners, this has allowed
direct contact with the authors of research papers at different (and sometimes the same!)
institutions. The Usenet News system has enabled learners to reach a far wider audience,
with less intrusion (since it is up to each user to decide to read the news, whereas email is
generally always read). Again, this provides a good resource for the learner to find out
more by asking questions and receiving a wide variety of responses, although often this
requires wading through a variety of 'me-too' responses, and flames (inflammatory
responses which tend to solicit ad hominem attacks). Electronic mailing lists are the email
equivalent of a newsgroup, although they are harder to find out about, but tend to have
less noise. FTP sites are another, now familiar, information source. Here electronic copies
of research papers can be stored at an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site and others can
then download (copy) them to their local machine for printing and reading. This is a rich
source of information in the sense that there is rarely any noise stored at an FTP site, but
it is hard to know where to look and what to look for,.except from some other
information source (such as a News article).
Recently, new types of information sources, such as the World Wide Web (WWW),
Gopher, and the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) databases have proliferated
(Berners-Lee et ai, 1992). Gopher can be viewed as a distributed menu system, where users
select items on a menu which may lead to another menu, or to some actual information
(such as a picture or a research paper). The WWW is a distributed hypertext system where
links to objects are embedded within other objects (where the objects can be text, pictures,
video, and other multimedia). Both Gopher and the WWW support the browsing model;
the user has actively to follow links to find information, in contrast to email or News
where the user passively receives information. WAIS databases are essentially free-text
search engines which allow for keyword searching of collections of documents.
The increase in the desire to use these networks, and the increase in the amount of
information being made available over them, is causing problems for both experienced
and novice users. This paper will introduce the problems, outline a possible solution, and
end with an indication of current progress.
Problems
Information sources such as mailing lists and Usenet tend to overwhelm users with the
sheer volume of information, often with a low ratio of signal to noise. Both can be
thought of as unsolicited information, where the user must invest large amounts of time
in reading to find the nuggets of useful information. By contrast, users of the WWW
70
An-j Volume 3 Number I
often have a different problem, that of navigation, by which we mean knowing where the
desired information is to be found. With WAIS databases, the problem is similar:
knowing which database to search. There is a directory-of-servers (a database consisting
of short descriptions about a large set of registered databases) to help with this, but as
with any centralized solution, it can be tied up with the multitude of requests from users
around the world. It is also not complete nor up to date.
Our current work is predicated on the belief that there is useful information in all these
information sources, but the trick is to know where to look. For example, one often finds
out about new WWW sites from the WWW Newsgroups. Another major source of
pointers to useful sites is from colleagues. There are also index sites which build a
database of pointers to other sites using some keyword mechanism to act as the key into
the database. These include the WAIS directory-of-servers, and there are several others
on the WWW (such as the Jumpstation, and the WWW Worm).
A solution - ELF
ELF is an attempt to address these problems. It is essentially a collection of agents which
co-operate together to aid users in finding information of relevance to their interests or
tasks, in a timely and efficient manner. One of the main aims of this project is for ELF to
work without explicitly requiring direct control by the user. To do this, ELF monitors the
user at work to determine (from files recently edited, for example) the areas of current
interest. ELF attempts to categorize the current work by a few keywords which are then
used to seed a search conducted by various agents. The results of this search are presented
to the user at some appropriate point (to avoid unnecessary interruptions in the user's
current task). ELF can also be controlled directly by the user. This means that the user
controls what information sources are searched, and decides on the search query terms.
There are two major sides to ELF. The first handles the user, and attempts to gain
knowledge about his or her tasks. The second is a back-end which consists of agents that
'know' how to query and search the various information sources. We will discuss each of
these parts of ELF in more detail below.
ELF allows for varying interaction with the user. The minimal level of interaction
involves a discrete icon on the screen from which various control panels can be accessed.
The only other ELF tool that needs to be seen is called PrISM (Personal Information
Space Manager). This is a hierarchical structuring tool which can be used as a simple
file/directory browser, but can allow for grouping together related tasks. PrISM allows
access to the keywords that ELF calculates for a directory or file, and provides for the
user to edit these. Users can also use PrISM to determine and control which agents are
currently working on their behalf. While it is indeed true that the hierarchical structuring
model leaves a lot to be desired, it is easy to understand, and matches naturally to the
common computer file system.
ELF provides several different mechanisms for notifying search results. In the case where
a search finishes and the user is currently logged on, ELF can notify by forcing Mosaic
71
R. Kirby et al. ELF: the Electronic Learning Facilitator
(or certain other WWW browsers) to pop up on the screen with a page containing
pointers to the results found, using the fact that Mosaic can access most types of
information sources, thus providing a simple click-to-access interface to the results.
Another option is to indicate within PrISM the presence of results at the relevant part of
the hierarchical structure. A third option is to provide an xbiff type program (xbiff is a
small icon that notifies the arrival of new mail by changing colour) to flag the arrival of
results. These clearly vary in intrusiveness to the user, from the popping-up Mosaic to the
small discrete icon in the corner of the screen.
If the user is currently logged off when the results arrive, ELF can either send a mail
message containing the pointers to the results, or allow for PrISM to indicate the presence
of results the next time the user logs on.
More experienced users can control ELF directly, using search parameters, and
requesting immediate searches (cf. traditional database searching where the user makes a
query and waits for the result). ELF also collects statistics about which keywords seem to
work best, and which information sources produce the best results (as selected by the
user). These can then be used either by ELF or the user to tailor the searching to fit in
more with the working practices of the user.
The back-end of ELF consists of the agents that perform the actual searching of the
various information sources. One agent (called the News agent) is responsible for
querying a database of news articles. One of its responsibilities is to find articles that
announce new WWW sites. This is done in a simple way by looking for ANNOUNCE (or
some derivative), followed by a Universal Resource Locator (URL) indicating where the
WWW site is.
Another agent interfaces to the Jumpstation search engine on the WWW. It mimics a
user-request to the Jumpstation and reformats the returned result (which is a WWW page
of links to the results) before presenting it to the user. Similarly, agents can be provided
for other WWW search engines, such as the WWW Worm and ALIWEB.
Other agents can include WAIS searchers, Gopher searchers, and mailing-list handlers.
Agents can also be designed to access interactive services such as BIDS (one of the library
catalogue systems). One of the drawbacks of providing agents that use the same interfaces
as the user, rather than requiring database implementers to provide a special Application
Programming Interface (API), is that if the interfaces change, the agents will no longer
work. This could be as simple a change as a rearrangement of some menus. We will
address this issue somewhat in the next section.
Since different information sources provide different search strategies (such as Boolean
exact matches, set operations, or partial matching), some agents have to do more work
than just sending a query on and retrieving the results. For example, an agent that
accesses a search engine that only accepts a single keyword, might need to submit several
searches for a multiple keyword query, and then combine the results, so that, as far as the
user or the rest of ELF is concerned, it answered the query in one fell swoop.
72 i
Volume 3 Number I
The departmental ELF
As outlined above, since ELF is a computer program, it can generate large amounts of
queries in a short space of time for long periods without rest (after all, this is why we replace
people with computers). It was quickly realized that if everyone used an ELF, then the
networks would be flooded, and the search engines accessed by the ELF agents would
overload. To address this, we propose a departmental level ELF. This ELF will be
responsible for actually doing the work. The agents of a user's ELF will submit their queries
to the departmental level ELF> which then has the opportunity to multiplex queries across
users (in other words, perform duplicate queries only once). Results can be cached and used
to answer later queries (recognizing that the results may be out of date). The departmental
ELF could also help mimic the Word of Mouth phenomenon by allowing for transferring
of information between user ELFs. Another benefit of the departmental ELF is to provide
centralized management of agents, which addresses the changing interface problem alluded
to in the previous section, by. requiring just one place to be changed.
Current state and future plans
A prototype for a single ELF is near completion. This ELF includes a database of news
articles (dynamically changing due to new articles coming in and old ones expiring), a
News agent that operates over this database looking for announcements or new WWW
sites, or just general keyword searching. Other agents include a Jumpstation agent and an
Archie agent (Archie is an index of most FTP sites in the world). The prototype also
includes PrISM, and a user-monitoring agent which periodically searches the user's
directory space for new or changed files, and attempts to categorize them with a few
keywords, using a combination of full-text analysis, typed-text analysis, and clustering
techniques. This ELF runs under the Unix environment running X, and is implemented in
a mixture of C++, TCL (Tool Command Language) and Perl.
The development of ELF will involve iterative design, with user testing at each stage. By
employing usability metrics, we are aiming to test groups of students, lecturers and
researchers using the initial prototype.
The development of ELF as a tool to support the process of learning in a higher-
education context is being conducted within an overall framework provided by the
concept of the Intensely Supportive Learning Environment (Sykes et al, 1993). This
adopts a constructivist approach to learning (Kommers et al, 1992) in which the learner
has available a range of tools for the performance of learning tasks. The process of
learning through active seeking and structuring knowledge is emphasized at the expense
of the traditional view of courseware as packaged and pre-digested exposition. An
important issue raised by this is the identification of the point at which the work done by
ELF agents might become counter-productive for an individual learner.
Final aims of the project are to build a departmental ELF, to port the user interface to
MS Windows, and to release the system to the UK academic community.
73
R. Kirby et al. ELF: the Electronic Learning Facilitator
References
Berners-Lee, T., Cailliau, R., Groff, J. & Pollermann, B. (1992), 'World-Wide Web: the
information universe' in Electronic Networking: Research, Applications and Policy, 1, 2
(Spring), Westport CT, Meckler.
Kommers, P., Jonassen, D. & Mayes, J.T. (1992) (eds), Cognitive Tools for Learning,
Berlin, Springer-Verlag.
Sykes, P., Schaper, J., Mayes, J.T., Palmin, H. & Marcipont, V., 'ISLE: a collaborative
project to build an Intensely Supportive Learning Environment' in Maurer, H. (ed),
Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia Annual: Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 93,
Charlottesville VA, AACE.
74


ELF: the Electronic Learning Facilitator

ELF:the Electronic Learning FacilitatorR. Kirby, R McAndrew, A. Kilgour, H. Taylor and J. T. MayesICBL, Heriot-Watt University, EdinburghAs the world-wide computer network becomes ubiquitous, new tools have been developed, such asthe 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 Newsavailable. This has led to a major problem of information overload: we are slowly but surely beingoverwhelmed by the amount of information available to us.To address this problem, the New Technology Initiative (NTI) of the Joint Information SystemsCommittee (JISC) is funding the ELF project over a period of two years to develop a tool, theElectronic Learning Facilitator. This tool is aimed at assisting learners to make effective use ofthe information available. The ELF project started in December 1993, with the goal of producinga tool for installation in UK academic sites.This paper first discusses the new networked information sources that are appearing around theglobe, and then analyses the requirements of learners for accessing this information. From therequirements, the paper shows the desirable features of an ELF, such as monitoring the user atwork to gain hints as to what he or she is doing, being guided by the user directly, and usinginformation gathered from other ELFs, or from monitoring the various information sources forannouncements of new services, updates of information, etc.The main body of the paper illustrates the current progress on the project, outlining theimplementation of the ELF- ELF is written using various high-level languages such as the ToolCommand Language (TCL) and Perl, as well as the more traditional C++. It consists of variousagents, each agent having a specific task to perform, such as monitoring a WWW site for any newdocuments, or monitoring a Usenet Newsgroup for articles that might be of particular interest tothe owner of the agent. Finally, the paper reports on our plans to test users on a prototype.IntroductionRecent years have seen an unprecedented increase in the use of the Internet and other69R KJrby et al. ELF: the Electronic Learning Facilitatorglobal networks of computers. We have seen estimates of between 100,000 and 1,000,000new users each month joining the Internet. Predominantly these are information seekers,but the figures do also represent a significant increase in the number of informationproviders. For learners, we now have a significant set of information sources, albeitobscured by a lot of noise.There are many different types of information sources now available, all with varyingattributes. For many years, the Internet has provided email. For learners, this has alloweddirect contact with the authors of research papers at different (and sometimes the same!)institutions. The Usenet News system has enabled learners to reach a far wider audience,with less intrusion (since it is up to each user to decide to read the news, whereas email isgenerally always read). Again, this provides a good resource for the learner to find outmore by asking questions and receiving a wide variety of responses, although often thisrequires wading through a variety of 'me-too' responses, and flames (inflammatoryresponses which tend to solicit ad hominem attacks). Electronic mailing lists are the emailequivalent of a newsgroup, although they are harder to find out about, but tend to haveless noise. FTP sites are another, now familiar, information source. Here electronic copiesof research papers can be stored at an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site and others canthen download (copy) them to their local machine for printing and reading. This is a richsource of information in the sense that there is rarely any noise stored at an FTP site, butit is hard to know where to look and what to look for,.except from some otherinformation source (such as a News article).Recently, new types of information sources, such as the World Wide Web (WWW),Gopher, and the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) databases have proliferated(Berners-Lee et ai, 1992). Gopher can be viewed as a distributed menu system, where usersselect items on a menu which may lead to another menu, or to some actual information(such as a picture or a research paper). The WWW is a distributed hypertext system wherelinks to objects are embedded within other objects (where the objects can be text, pictures,video, and other multimedia). Both Gopher and the WWW support the browsing model;the user has actively to follow links to find information, in contrast to email or Newswhere the user passively receives information. WAIS databases are essentially free-textsearch engines which allow for keyword searching of collections of documents.The increase in the desire to use these networks, and the increase in the amount ofinformation being made available over them, is causing problems for both experiencedand novice users. This paper will introduce the problems, outline a possible solution, andend with an indication of current progress.ProblemsInformation sources such as mailing lists and Usenet tend to overwhelm users with thesheer volume of information, often with a low ratio of signal to noise. Both can bethought of as unsolicited information, where the user must invest large amounts of timein reading to find the nuggets of useful information. By contrast, users of the WWW70An-j Volume 3 Number Ioften have a different problem, that of navigation, by which we mean knowing where thedesired information is to be found. With WAIS databases, the problem is similar:knowing which database to search. There is a directory-of-servers (a database consistingof short descriptions about a large set of registered databases) to help with this, but aswith any centralized solution, it can be tied up with the multitude of requests from usersaround the world. It is also not complete nor up to date.Our current work is predicated on the belief that there is useful information in all theseinformation sources, but the trick is to know where to look. For example, one often findsout about new WWW sites from the WWW Newsgroups. Another major source ofpointers to useful sites is from colleagues. There are also index sites which build adatabase of pointers to other sites using some keyword mechanism to act as the key intothe database. These include the WAIS directory-of-servers, and there are several otherson the WWW (such as the Jumpstation, and the WWW Worm).A solution - ELFELF is an attempt to address these problems. It is essentially a collection of agents whichco-operate together to aid users in finding information of relevance to their interests ortasks, in a timely and efficient manner. One of the main aims of this project is for ELF towork without explicitly requiring direct control by the user. To do this, ELF monitors theuser at work to determine (from files recently edited, for example) the areas of currentinterest. ELF attempts to categorize the current work by a few keywords which are thenused to seed a search conducted by various agents. The results of this search are presentedto the user at some appropriate point (to avoid unnecessary interruptions in the user'scurrent task). ELF can also be controlled directly by the user. This means that the usercontrols what information sources are searched, and decides on the search query terms.There are two major sides to ELF. The first handles the user, and attempts to gainknowledge about his or her tasks. The second is a back-end which consists of agents that'know' how to query and search the various information sources. We will discuss each ofthese parts of ELF in more detail below.ELF allows for varying interaction with the user. The minimal level of interactioninvolves a discrete icon on the screen from which various control panels can be accessed.The only other ELF tool that needs to be seen is called PrISM (Personal InformationSpace Manager). This is a hierarchical structuring tool which can be used as a simplefile/directory browser, but can allow for grouping together related tasks. PrISM allowsaccess to the keywords that ELF calculates for a directory or file, and provides for theuser to edit these. Users can also use PrISM to determine and control which agents arecurrently working on their behalf. While it is indeed true that the hierarchical structuringmodel leaves a lot to be desired, it is easy to understand, and matches naturally to thecommon computer file system.ELF provides several different mechanisms for notifying search results. In the case wherea search finishes and the user is currently logged on, ELF can notify by forcing Mosaic71R. Kirby et al. ELF: the Electronic Learning Facilitator(or certain other WWW browsers) to pop up on the screen with a page containingpointers to the results found, using the fact that Mosaic can access most types ofinformation sources, thus providing a simple click-to-access interface to the results.Another option is to indicate within PrISM the presence of results at the relevant part ofthe hierarchical structure. A third option is to provide an xbiff type program (xbiff is asmall icon that notifies the arrival of new mail by changing colour) to flag the arrival ofresults. These clearly vary in intrusiveness to the user, from the popping-up Mosaic to thesmall discrete icon in the corner of the screen.If the user is currently logged off when the results arrive, ELF can either send a mailmessage containing the pointers to the results, or allow for PrISM to indicate the presenceof results the next time the user logs on.More experienced users can control ELF directly, using search parameters, andrequesting immediate searches (cf. traditional database searching where the user makes aquery and waits for the result). ELF also collects statistics about which keywords seem towork best, and which information sources produce the best results (as selected by theuser). These can then be used either by ELF or the user to tailor the searching to fit inmore with the working practices of the user.The back-end of ELF consists of the agents that perform the actual searching of thevarious information sources. One agent (called the News agent) is responsible forquerying a database of news articles. One of its responsibilities is to find articles thatannounce new WWW sites. This is done in a simple way by looking for ANNOUNCE (orsome derivative), followed by a Universal Resource Locator (URL) indicating where theWWW site is.Another agent interfaces to the Jumpstation search engine on the WWW. It mimics auser-request to the Jumpstation and reformats the returned result (which is a WWW pageof links to the results) before presenting it to the user. Similarly, agents can be providedfor other WWW search engines, such as the WWW Worm and ALIWEB.Other agents can include WAIS searchers, Gopher searchers, and mailing-list handlers.Agents can also be designed to access interactive services such as BIDS (one of the librarycatalogue systems). One of the drawbacks of providing agents that use the same interfacesas the user, rather than requiring database implementers to provide a special ApplicationProgramming Interface (API), is that if the interfaces change, the agents will no longerwork. This could be as simple a change as a rearrangement of some menus. We willaddress this issue somewhat in the next section.Since different information sources provide different search strategies (such as Booleanexact matches, set operations, or partial matching), some agents have to do more workthan just sending a query on and retrieving the results. For example, an agent thataccesses a search engine that only accepts a single keyword, might need to submit severalsearches for a multiple keyword query, and then combine the results, so that, as far as theuser or the rest of ELF is concerned, it answered the query in one fell swoop.72 iVolume 3 Number IThe departmental ELFAs outlined above, since ELF is a computer program, it can generate large amounts ofqueries in a short space of time for long periods without rest (after all, this is why we replacepeople with computers). It was quickly realized that if everyone used an ELF, then thenetworks would be flooded, and the search engines accessed by the ELF agents wouldoverload. To address this, we propose a departmental level ELF. This ELF will beresponsible for actually doing the work. The agents of a user's ELF will submit their queriesto the departmental level ELF> which then has the opportunity to multiplex queries acrossusers (in other words, perform duplicate queries only once). Results can be cached and usedto answer later queries (recognizing that the results may be out of date). The departmentalELF could also help mimic the Word of Mouth phenomenon by allowing for transferringof information between user ELFs. Another benefit of the departmental ELF is to providecentralized management of agents, which addresses the changing interface problem alludedto in the previous section, by. requiring just one place to be changed.Current state and future plansA prototype for a single ELF is near completion. This ELF includes a database of newsarticles (dynamically changing due to new articles coming in and old ones expiring), aNews agent that operates over this database looking for announcements or new WWWsites, or just general keyword searching. Other agents include a Jumpstation agent and anArchie agent (Archie is an index of most FTP sites in the world). The prototype alsoincludes PrISM, and a user-monitoring agent which periodically searches the user'sdirectory space for new or changed files, and attempts to categorize them with a fewkeywords, using a combination of full-text analysis, typed-text analysis, and clusteringtechniques. This ELF runs under the Unix environment running X, and is implemented ina mixture of C++, TCL (Tool Command Language) and Perl.The development of ELF will involve iterative design, with user testing at each stage. Byemploying usability metrics, we are aiming to test groups of students, lecturers andresearchers using the initial prototype.The development of ELF as a tool to support the process of learning in a higher-education context is being conducted within an overall framework provided by theconcept of the Intensely Supportive Learning Environment (Sykes et al, 1993). Thisadopts a constructivist approach to learning (Kommers et al, 1992) in which the learnerhas available a range of tools for the performance of learning tasks. The process oflearning through active seeking and structuring knowledge is emphasized at the expenseof the traditional view of courseware as packaged and pre-digested exposition. Animportant issue raised by this is the identification of the point at which the work done byELF agents might become counter-productive for an individual learner.Final aims of the project are to build a departmental ELF, to port the user interface toMS Windows, and to release the system to the UK academic community.73R. Kirby et al. ELF: the Electronic Learning FacilitatorReferencesBerners-Lee, T., Cailliau, R., Groff, J. & Pollermann, B. (1992), 'World-Wide Web: theinformation universe' in Electronic Networking: Research, Applications and Policy, 1, 2(Spring), Westport CT, Meckler.Kommers, P., Jonassen, D. & Mayes, J.T. (1992) (eds), Cognitive Tools for Learning,Berlin, Springer-Verlag.Sykes, P., Schaper, J., Mayes, J.T., Palmin, H. & Marcipont, V., 'ISLE: a collaborativeproject to build an Intensely Supportive Learning Environment' in Maurer, H. (ed),Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia Annual: Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 93,Charlottesville VA, AACE.74

Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in the use of the Internet and other 69 global networks of computers. We have seen estimates of between 100,000 and 1,000,000 new users each month joining the Internet. Predominantly these are information seekers, but the figures do also represent a significant increase in the number of information providers. For learners, we now have a significant set of information sources, albeit obscured by a lot of noise

P. McAndrew

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Research in Learning Technology

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 requireme..

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