WebCT Founder Launches Brainify
Vancouver, British Columbia (CA), January 2009 - Murray Goldberg, founder of WebCT, has announced the beta launch of Brainify.com - an academic community for university and college students and their instructors centred on academic social bookmarking. In addition to bookmarking, Brainify includes the ability to create groups of common academic interest, to pose academic questions to the student community, and to follow the collections, comments, and questions of other respected community members closely.
Brainify also records each user's "reputation" - a value based on the community's reaction to the contributions of that user. The reputation gives users an immediate idea of how each member's contributions are valued. In addition, if Brainify - the company - is ever sold, it intends to distribute thirty percent of the proceeds of the sale to community members according to their individual reputations.
Murray Goldberg explains: "Brainify is about connecting students to each other and to web-based academic resources. There is an amazing number of outstanding academic sites on the web. If a great site exists, there is a student somewhere who knows about it. If a student has a question, there is another student somewhere who knows the answer."
"Brainify is the place to make those connections happen. It is about student-focused education, academic community, and peer learning. Although students have strong and far-reaching social communities, their academic community is typically limited to those few students who are taking the same courses as they. As Brainify grows, we hope it will facilitate the creation of widespread, persistent academic communities for all students."
There is an overwhelming number of websites with academic content. The problem is finding the best site to help explain a concept or answer a question. At Brainify, students and instructors bookmark academic websites they have found to be useful in the courses they are taking or teaching. When they do so, they are asked to rate, tag, and comment on the website. In addition, they are asked to categorize the website in an academic taxonomy (or hierarchy).
This metadata associated with each bookmark ensures that when a new student needs a resource to understand a course topic better or to prepare for an exam or assignment, he or she is presented immediately with the most directly appropriate websites. In addition, the community input ensures that the best sites (the ones that have been of the most help to other students) are presented at the top of the list - a feature that cannot be replicated by general search engines.
Brainify's goal is to become an academic resource that includes a wealth of peer-vetted content and houses a worldwide academic community of students and professors.
