PITFs developed an online collaborative research tool that allowed students to work in teams to analyze primary sources and to create sets of searchable online notecards. Students used social computing-style tagging to annotate the cards. The Collaborative Research Tool was built using the Cake PHP framework. The user interface was updated and refined, and a larger data set of source materials was imported into the application in 2009.

Teaching Challenge:

Typically, evidence about things is broadly distributed across a huge range of sources and thinly deposited within a given source. For that reason, this research tool facilitated a ‘sifting’ approach wherein each researcher worked rapidly through a given text or source, noting or copying out passages that were relevant to the subject at hand.