Thought Ark is a free web application and collaborative space that utilize the search behaviors of the users to determine the value of various bibliographic resources. Users can identify people with similar interests and interact with them and their resources. Finally, the sources once identified can be collated and cited (APA Citation format) in papers written and published through Thought Ark. Thus, Thought Ark combines a number of facilities, such as social bookmarking, social editing, online publishing and social networking, all in the context of higher education. The program offers professors and students the opportunity to work side by side sharing resources, to collaborate and edit papers and to determine through ordinary usage which resources are more valuable and which are less.

Thought Ark was developed in conjunction with Dr. Sorin Matei and TLT student developers Kevin Mohr, Andrew Prasetyo Jo, Jillian Traycoff, and Brian Snyder. The application was developed with Ruby on Rails, an Object Oriented Programming language built around Ruby syntax. For more information about Thought Ark, contact Dr. Sorin Matei at Purdue University.

Related links:

• 2010-2011 Instructional Technology Grants Program Cancelled!
• Purdue University TLT Instructional Technology Grants Program
• Grants Showcase
• Instructional Technology Grants Showcase: Cropview