Collaborative Research Tool

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.