Brainify hits the Internet

A new social program will use Web 2.0 to help students achieve a 4.0.

Murray Goldberg, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia, created Brainify to help students connect and share academic resources. The site, which launched roughly three weeks ago, is modeled after mainstream social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, but limits its membership to those with university e-mail addresses and organizes links based on academic discipline.

Goldberg, who previously developed WebCT, a program similar to Blackboard, said students often are limited to interacting with individuals in their own class or university, even though students around the world are taking the same courses and learning the same material.

"Even with tools like [WebCT], there's very tall walls built around the classroom, which makes it hard for students to connect," Goldberg said.

He said the idea for Brainify developed as he watched his students utilize the Internet with greater frequency and success.

"Students, if they had a question, before coming to me they would go look it up on the Web, and that's good ," Goldberg said. "There's so much out there."

With the explosion of academic material on the Web and the popularity of Web 2.0 technologies, Goldberg said he decided to develop a network where students and faculty could interact with each other and amass the most useful sites on the Web in one place.

He also decided to limit the user base to those with an academic e-mail address, at least initially, to help preserve the integrity of the site as it develops. He said that so far, traffic has been heavier than he expected, considering how few people know about the site, and the visitors have been predominately faculty.

"Most of the people signing up so far are not students, they're faculty members, and I think that's because we haven't gotten the word out yet to students," Goldberg said.

He said he hopes to see the site grow steadily over the next few years because more users means more resources.

"It just works better the larger it gets," Goldberg said. "It would be an incredible success with half a million or a million students."

Instructional designer Diane Richmond said more and more of Truman's professors use Web-based tools, such as Blackboard, in the classroom each semester.

"Roughly half of our faculty currently use Blackboard in ways that range from a place to simply post a syllabus and class schedule to full-out online courses," Richmond said.

In addition to Blackboard, Truman hosts many professor Web sites and offers TruTube, a multimedia conversion tool that allows faculty to embed audio and video clips on Truman's Web pages.

Others look outside the Truman server for Web resources to enhance their classes.

"Many faculty make use of a wide variety of other wild Web-based services such as blogs and wikis, as well as collaborative document sharing as is found in GoogleDocs," Richmond said.

She said she has seen professors utilize YouTube, Merlot.org, Linked-In, Moodle and a host of other sites. Some professors even have experimented with Delicious.com and Diigo.com, mainstream social bookmarking sites which Brainify would like to supplant in the academic setting.

"Social bookmarking is an emerging trend here, though of course we don't have good numbers on this as faculty typically do this type of thing on their own," Richmond said. "Brainify looks to be an exciting addition to that playing field as it is targeted right to education."

Sophomore Seth Donaldson said he has used Blackboard and Moodle in classes with mixed results. He said he would like to see students and faculty use Web-based programs more often so that they will run into fewer problems caused by not knowing how to use the software.

"I think it's helpful when the teacher uses it right, but sometimes the teacher will say to use stuff on [Blackboard] and then it won't work right all of the time, so it makes it kind of difficult that way," Donaldson said. "I still think there's a lot more we can do with [Web-based programs], it's a work in progress."