This project was conducted as part of a PhD Thesis at the Centre for Research in IT in Education , School of Education and School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin.

The overall focus is on PhD supervisions, planning and management with the aim of extending out to design meetings and informal academic conference meeting (ad-hoc). MobileCog leverages the latest Web 2.0 and emerging web technologies in order to deliver planning, managing and implementation tools to researchers in a mobile, collaborative and flexible manner.

Currently MobileCog's focus is on providing a writing assistant tool, CAWriter (Cognitive Assistant or Cognitive Apprenticeship Writer) for researchers, as writing is a major part of any academic work. It takes a non linear approach to writing, where the author is free to connect ideas and lay them out as they see fit, thus forming a conceptual framework that provides an overview of their research. This conceptual framework acts as the basis for the literature review. During the literature review CAWriter supports the attachment of references, annotations, notes and quotes to research papers, and provides a quality assessment form to evaluate papers. Elements from the conceptual framework can then be added into a tree hierarchy in order to create a document structure and output a basic draft document. See features and tutorials for more detail.

CAWriter is an open source project and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Currently, CAWriter is in the early stages of development and is not yet available for download but the latest code will be available through a subversion repository as soon as it is stable and useful.

As this is an experimental (beta) site, it is best viewed in Google Chrome 10.0+, javascript on (usually is by default) and a resolution of at least 1024 x 600. It may not perform as desired in other browsers and may risk the loss of data.