Current Research
CERLIM Research Team has received funding from LearnHigher to undertake a study to identify current developments in mobile Learning in UK higher education, and to assess the use and viability of learning objects delivered via mobile technologies. The M-Learning project objectives are to identify current developments in mLearning in higher education and other educational areas in the UK, and to develop and pilot two learning objects to be delivered and accessed via mobile devices. The two learning objects will be:- Analyse This!!! online tutorial developed by CERLIM
- ASK, the Assignment Survival Kit
Geoff Butters is a Research Associate, and has an M.Sc. in Business Administration and IT, and has worked on various JISC-funded studies as well as several European Commission funded IT-based research projects. For more than a decade he has researched the delivery of library and information services via the Internet and World Wide Web, beginning with the European funded BIBDEL project in 1995. More recently Geoff managed the European project COINE (Cultural Objects In Networked Environments), which developed a web-based service that enabled people (including children in two primary schools) to record on the web their own contributions to cultural heritage using oral history, photographs, video and images as well as written documents, to tell their stories. Other research areas have included a hybrid library demonstrator system; a prototype broker service; electronic current awareness service; and portal development. Currently Geoff has recently completed work on the EU project 'eMapps.com' a project to motivate participation of schoolchildren in digital online multimedia technologies using mobile game playing technology. He has expertise in Web 2.0 technologies and co-ordinates CERLIM's use of these tools.
Jenny Craven is a Research Associate, has an MA by Research in Information and Library Management. She has worked for CERLIM for over 10 years, working on a variety of research projects concerned with web accessibility and usability, with a particular focus on access to information by blind or visually impaired people and has contributed as facilitator to the Force Foundation series of workshops on assisting library services to become more accessible to visually impaired people which have taken place in Chile, Mexico, Vietnam, Brazil, and Sabah. She has conducted a number of user requirements and user testing studies including people with disabilities, most recently to support the development of an accessibility assessment tool for the European Internet Accessibility Observatory project. She is currently working on an Erasmus Lifelong Learning funded project: web_access, which is developing a joint study programme on accessible web design with partners from 6 European countries. Her research experience is utilized by her teaching and supervision at undergraduate and postgraduate level and she has recently been funded by the HE Academy to create an interactive data analysis online learning object Analyse This!!!
Jillian Griffiths is a Research Associate in CERLIM. Since joining the CERLIM team in 1999 she has worked on a number of projects focussed on the distributed delivery of library and information services and evaluation of projects and programmes and user testing and evaluation. Most recently Jill has worked on Analyse This!!! - the development of a reusable interactive learning object on data analysis and currently Jill is undertaking research on students' information literacy with her colleague Bob Glass as part of the HEFCE funded LearnHigher CETL at MMU and has contributed to the Higher Education Academy funded project Building curricula for the 21st century learner - a tool kit for diversity review led by Liz Marr. Much of Jill's work has focussed on academic use (student, lecturer and researcher of UK HEIs) of electronic information sources (and identification of their information needs) and on information systems performance and usability and she has conducted numerous user testing experiments to research these areas, both on a one-to-one basis and simultaneous multiple user testing. Jill's teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level is research led and focuses on Research methods (which she runs with a colleague as part of the undergraduate Project Development unit); Information Retrieval, including Information Seeking Behaviour; Evaluation of IR systems; and Organising Information. She also supervises at undergraduate and postgraduate level.