What's BrainifyDo You Own Brainify?Helpful ReadingWho Are We?Legal StuffContact Us
What's Brainify?
Brainify is academic social bookmarking
and networking for college and university students. If you are looking for
the best sites and a great community to help with your courses, this is the place
for you.
- It's for Students and Professors: Brainify is only
for you: University and College students and your Professors to help you with one
thing – do well in your courses.
- To Help You Learn: Collect and
share the academic websites that other students found useful in their courses.
- To Get Answers: Stumped on
an assignment or project and need an answer? Ask your question here using the Ask
a Question link on the right.
- To Build An Academic Network:
Connect with and learn from other students around the world.
- Help Brainify Grow and it Might Help
You: You own a bit of Brainify each time you collect a website, recommend
it to a friend, make a comment, answer a question, etc. (well – not really, but
close – read the truth here).
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Brainify is only for University and College students (OK – we allow professors as
well). Brainify is about helping you do the best in, and get the most out
of, your University and College courses. Making the most of our education is easily
one of the most important things we do in our lives. This site is intended to allow
us (students and faculty) to help each other do just that. If it is not about helping
you in your day to day coursework – it is not here.
Find and collect the best academic content on the web – rated, tagged and organized
by academic discipline. The core of Brainify is about sharing the best academic
websites. Websites exist to describe almost any concept or answer pretty much any
question you could ever have about your coursework – and more are added all the
time. The problem is finding the best one with that bit of information you need
now. Search engines don’t help that much. I guarantee you, however, that some other
student taking a similar course, has already found it. In addition, chances are
that you already know of a site or two that would really help a lot of other students
in their courses. Brainify gives you a place to bookmark the academic websites you
found to be useful. It also asks you to tag them, comment on them, rate them, and
categorize them. Once you’ve done that, not only can you now come back to them instantly,
but they also become available to all other students on Brainify – along with your
insights about them. This is social bookmarking in an academic environment, and
it is the heart of Brainify.
Stumped on an assignment or project and need an answer? Ask your question here using
the Ask a Question link on the right. Need a question answered and you can’t
find the answer in any of the websites you’ve found? Then go to the Brainify “Questions”
area and ask the members. There are a lot of students in the world, and I guarantee
that many of them have had the same question before, and have found the answer.
And what if you see a question that you know the answer to? Well answer it, of course.
You can do so out of the goodness of your heart, but you can also do so knowing
that a good answer will increase your reputation in the Brainify community. And
reputation counts for more in Brainify than pretty much any other community. For
more information check this out
Do you own Brainify?
Connect with other University and College students with Groups, Friends and other
Brainiacs. We learn from each other. Brainify helps you connect to other
students around the world. Find students in similar programs and view their collections
to see what has helped them in their courses. Create groups to connect with students
interested in a particular academic discipline. Ask questions of students who are
taking similar programs. Connect with friends to build a community of peers that
you can maintain beyond school into your career.
Reputation counts for a lot in Brainify. Everything you do that is judged
as valuable by the other members of Brainify adds to your reputation. And if Brainify
(the company) ever changes hands, our intent is to distribute 30% of the sale price
among Brainify members, according to their reputation. We want Brainify to succeed
for many reasons – chief among them the tremendous resource it could be to all students.
But we want everyone to benefit and this is our way of trying to make that more
likely. By the way – two of the biggest ways to accumulate reputation points are
by bookmarking websites new to Brainify, and by recommending Brainify to your friends.
So the sooner you start, the more you are likely to gain. For more information check
this out Do you own Brainify?
Brainify is for professors as well. Want to do something very easy and effective
to help your students? Try Academic Collaborative (Social) Bookmarking! Create a
group for your course (click “My Groups” and then “Create new Group” at the top
of the resulting page) and then you and your students can collaborate to collect
bookmarks to web pages your students will find useful in your course. The bookmarks
can be associated with your group so that you develop a library of web sites for
your course. Your group and each bookmark in it can act as a learning resource,
or as a focus for discussion and debate. Try it – it engages your students and is
incredibly helpful to them.
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Check out the link to the Quick Start Guide on the
Helpful Reading page. Then explore Brainify by clicking around the various tabs.
And finally, make yourself an account and start bookmarking your favorite academic
websites! Welcome to Brainify.
Do You Own Brainify?
We want this community to belong to its members. Do you own Brainify? Well, no –
but close. Our intent is that if Brainify ever changes hands (sells), we will distribute
30% of the proceeds of the sale among the members of Brainify.
We are hoping to do this for two reasons. First, I think that if Brainify develops
a large member community and (consequently) large bookmark base, it will be an amazing
resource and community for students around the world. By recognizing the stake that
members have in Brainify, we are hoping it will help our community reach its full
potential. And second, if we are fortunate enough to have some dedicated early members
who help build the collection, I think it would be only fair if there were some
way to possibly reward them. In fact, I always found it a bit odd when community
based websites would sell and the most important people, those members responsible
for the success of the community, did not benefit from the sale. It just seems like
the right thing to do.
As a result, we intend to keep a record of how the community values the contributions
of individual members. This will be a number called the member’s “reputation points”.
It will be an imperfect measurement, but the best we can do. Then in the event of
a sale, we plan to distribute the 30% according to each member’s points. There are
other aspects to this that you can only fully understand if you do some further
reading. Please look at the following documents on the Brainify blog:
Helpful reading about brainify
These readings link to the Brainify blog. There you can find general information
on the different aspects of Brainify.
Who are we?
We are a very small team of people who care a lot about education. My name is Murray
Goldberg and I am the founder of Brainify. For 10 years or so I was a faculty member
in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Then I started
a project called WebCT and turned it into a company. For those of you not familiar
with WebCT, we made software that simplified the process of putting courses on line
for Universities and Colleges. Since then I was a co-founder of another company
called Silicon Chalk. There we built software for students who used laptops in their
classes. The software facilitated interaction in the classroom and produced searchable
recordings of classes including student notes timed to the instructor’s presentation.
For a long time (since late WebCT days) I have wanted to build something like Brainify.
The idea has evolved a lot over the last few years, and in late 2006 I finally decided
to take the plunge. It took a while to design and implement, but we are finally
here - launched in November 2008.
I am lucky to be working with a small team of great people. You will meet some of
them over time, I am sure. From the beginning, people that have worked on Brainify
include Narayan (system architect & programmer), Nic (programmer), Peter (programmer),
Shan (programmer), Fong (co-op student programmer) and Eleanor (all-around helper).
Welcome to Brainify. We all hope you like it.
Contact us
We want to hear from you if you have a suggestion about Brainify. Please write to
us at help@brainify.com. We will do everything
we can to get back to you quickly – but since there are many of you and only a few
of us, please excuse any potential delays. - Thanks, Murray.