User:Edtechguy46/Brainify

Brainify is a an academic social bookmarking and social network service website intended primarily for university and college students and their professors. Its stated goal is to provide a site where students are able to build a shared, on-line library of web-based academic resources and to join a community of learners. The site was founded by Murray Goldberg, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Murray was also the founder of WebCT, a widely used virtual learning environment. Brainify is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Within 10 days of the launch of Brainify, members had joined from over 200 universities. Brainify has been both applauded and criticised for the requirement that members must have a university or college-assigned e-mail address - though other use of the site is open to the public.

Academic social bookmarking
Brainify supports traditional social bookmarking features. For example, members are able to submit websites to Brainify. At that time or later, additional metadata such as tags, ratings, and descriptions can be associated with the bookmark. In addition, as a result of Brainify's academic focus, metadata indicating the academic topic can be associated with the bookmark by placing it into an academic hierarchy. The intent of the metadata is to leverage the collective ratings, categorizations and other metadata to help other users find the most relevant academic websites - as chosen by the user community.

Academic taxonomy
A feature of Brainify which is not typical of bookmarking sites is its academic taxonomy or hierarchy. The taxonomy is member-defined; any member is able to create new topics in the taxonomy. Bookmarks are organized into topics within the taxonomy according to the members. The taxonomy provides a mechanism for site visitors and members to browse academic topics, finding bookmarks, users, groups and questions categorized in that topic.

Questions
Brainify allows members to pose academic questions to other members taking similar courses or degree programs.

Groups
Brainify supports the creation of academic groups. Members can creat groups, join groups, add bookmarks to groups, and carry on conversations in groups. Group membership can be open or moderated, and bookmarking in groups can be open, moderated, or closed to members. According to Brainify, one of the intended uses of the group feature is to allow faculty members to create groups for the courses they teach, and then bookmark references to websites useful to their students.

Community
Brainify provides mechanisms which allow users to follow the activities of other members, view the bookmarks they have collected, the questions they have asked, and the groups they are a member of.

Reputation
For each member, Brainify records a value it calls Reputation Points which are meant to reflect the contributions of that member to the community, as judged by the community. Those points will be used as a basis for it to distribute 30% pf the proceeds of sale, should Brainify ever be sold.

History
Brainify was launched in January, 2009.

Selected newspaper articles commenting on brainify

 * Story about Brainify in the Chronicle of Higher Education
 * Story about Brainify in the Binghamton University Pipe Dream
 * Story about Brainify in the Douglas College The Other Press
 * Story about Brainify in the UW-Stout newspaper New Stoutonia
 * Story about Brainify in the Bridgewater College newspaper The Comment
 * Story about Brainify in the Truman State newspaper
 * Story about Brainify in the University of Denver College newspaper The Clarion
 * Story about Brainify in the Morehouse College Newspaper The Maroon Tiger
 * Story about Brainify in the Purdue Newspaper The Exponent
 * Story about Brainify in the University of Athabasca's The Voice
 * Story about Brainify in the University of Kent newspaper Inquire
 * Story about Brainify in the CSU Sacramento newspaper The Hornet