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Nicky Ferguson - research consultant, new technologies, information, education, researchers' behaviour. Clax Ltd |
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Nicky FergusonNicky Ferguson works as a research consultant in the areas broadly defined by new technologies, information, education, research and researchers' behaviour. I am managing director of Clax Ltd. |
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What I doTypically I work in a small team, often coordinating or project managing. Work ranges from new research to evaluation of technologies, programmes and projects. Often the team includes colleagues from other countries, usually the work involves interviews, either face to face or, increasingly, by structured teleconferences. Sometimes the team itself is comprised of technology experts and the work is mainly surveying the state of the art and allowing the team to comment and develop a coherent argument. Other times, the task is to interview leading figures internationally and to synthesise and comment upon leading edge or bleeding edge developments, future trends, possibilities for directing future funding. Administering and analysing web-based questionnaires is another area of expertise, although with the proliferation of such tools we find that it is often only worth using them if you carefully identify and target the contacts. Clients include: JISC, Becta, ESRCColleagues with whom I have recently worked include:
Studies and reports I have worked on (*=led by me) include:2009-10 - Exchanging Research Information in the UK research and report for JISC - Feb 2010. JISC commissioned project consultants Nikki Rogers, Nicky Ferguson and Lesly Huxley to undertake an investigation into the requirements and possible options for adopting a UK-wide research data exchange standard such as CERIF. *2008 - Feasibility study for JISC into approaches to improve the consistency with which repositories share material. See: http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/11/11/is-consistent-metadata-worthwhile/ 2008 - Good Practice Guidelines for Repository Owners. For Becta (Andrew Kitchen). Led by Neil Smith. Surveys issues raised by current work on repositories for learning materials and makes recommendations for guidelines across eight areas: Standards and specifications, Sharing mechanisms, Marketing to users, User interface, E-safety, Accessibility, Quality, IPRs and copyright. The team surveyed 70 primary sources, including internal documents supplied by Becta, key published documents and web-based resources including several learning repositories. *2007 - Sharing eLearning Content - a synthesis and commentary for JISC (Neil Jacobs) based on an examination of over 30 JISC-funded/identified projects and on over 70 papers and outputs from these projects. http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/46/ 2007 - Comparative Review of Federated Resource Discovery Systems - for Becta (Andrew Kitchen). Led by Neil Smith. Details standards and current practice in five areas: metadata; exposing content; search infrastructures; presentation of results; managing location and identity: resolution systems and discovery services. Describes an overall strategic context and an inclusive overall architecture for federated resource discovery, recommends best practice for different actors based on the research undertaken; and expands on the main roll-out issues. *2006 - A strategic review of their core resource discovery services for JISC (Rachel Bruce) (Core discovery services in this context were: Archives Hub, COPAC, SUNCAT, and Zetoc). We produced two reports, the first an evaluation across the four services and the second an advisory report making 56 general and specific recommendations, both for the services and also for the key national players such as JISC, The British Library, the RIN etc. *2006 - A review of the information environment for the social sciences for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
This report was commissioned by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council, UK) in response to widespread concerns and uncertainties about the rate of change in the environment within which social and economic researchers find and access information crucial to their work. It was written with Seb Schmoller, with guidance from an ESRC Advisory Group chaired by Lynne Brindley.
2006 - JISC (Balviar Notay) commissioned Neil Smith, Seb Schmoller and me to design and facilitate an invitation workshop to consider how to take forward relevant recommendations from our original study - *Personalisation in presentation services, http://www.therightplace.net/jp/quotes.html *2005 - Software Quality Evaluator - http://www.therightplace.net/sqe/ This study, commissioned by JISC (Richard McKenna), evaluated the software produced by the 22 Distributed eLearning Tools projects and the effect of the programme's approach and management on the production of the software. The activities conducted during this study included an online questionnaire, face to face interviews with every project conducted at their lead institution, a selective check of the code created by each project, testing the software products and evaluating the accessibility and usability of the products where appropriate. Previous career historyNicky Ferguson worked from 1993-2003 at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. He joined the University to set up the pilot information service SOSIG. This spawned a large number of national and international collaborations and by the time he left in 2003, to work as a consultant, he had directed the Institute for 18 months as well as serving as Research Director and in many other capacities. The staff at the institute had increased from 7 to 70 in that period, with an annual turnover of over £2.5 million. Relevant previous projects and positionsNicky also directed the EC Fourth Framework Telematics for Research funded project known as DESIRE. DESIRE developed training and dissemination mechanisms to encourage the wide participation of libraries and librarians in the creation and maintenance of high quality Internet-accessible teaching and learning resources. The first phase of DESIRE was a multi-million Euro project involving 23 partners across Europe in nine work packages. DESIRE2 was a smaller more focused project, building on the successes of DESIRE1 and delivering, amongst other things the Information Gateways Handbook - a guide to the technical and information issues involved in high quality portal creation: http://www.desire.org/handbook The DESIRE project involved producing and editing a substantial on-line workbook written by over a dozen different authors from several countries. Leading this project required the ability to push towards consensus or compromise in the most demanding situations. |
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