Brainify. It’s not Myspace or Facebook, where students build social connections, but a website that helps students build an academic community.

At Brainify.com, students and their professors can work together to build a collection of bookmarked websites that they find useful in their courses. Students also have the ability to find the best rated websites, network with other students and even build reputation by making contributions that other members find helpful.

Murray Goldberg, founder of WebCT, an online system for e-learning that many colleges use including Sacramento State, is a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia. He said in an interview that he created Brainify to give students who are taking similar courses all over the world a way to help one another.

“For years now, in the back of my head, I’ve always thought to myself it’d be fantastic if there were some way to be able to connect students on an academic level with other students who are taking similar kinds of degree programs,” Goldberg said.

With Brainify, students can bookmark sites they think are helpful for their classes not only for themselves, but also for each other.

Goldberg said he hopes to “give students a place where they can make sense of all the great academic content online and help one another basically find that great content.”

Timi Poeppelman, journalism and communication studies lecturer, said she uses a ListProc for her classes, which sends out e-mail notifications to students regarding announcements and other important information.

Poeppelman said she could see how Brainify would be a good thing to use for her theory or critical thinking classes but thinks that sometimes it is easier to stick to what you are already using.

“It’s hard to switch gears in the middle of something, but I can see where, depending on what kind of class I taught, it would be a really good thing,” Poeppelman said.

One of Goldberg’s goals for Brainify is to allow students to find useful information for their classes without having to take the time to sort through countless websites.

“I wanted students to find those one or two web pages and to bookmark them on Brainify so that when subsequent students come to Brainify, they don’t just find the 5,000,” Goldberg said. “Maybe there are the 5,000 bookmarked there on what they want, but the two or the three or the four or the five absolute best ones are there at the top because they’ve been rated by the other students.”

Lisa Dushane, junior liberal studies major, said she thought Brainify would be helpful at Sac State.

“It would help cut down on your research time because you can find something useful instead of spending countless hours on stuff that’s not useful,” Dushane said.

With Brainify, students and professors can earn reputation points in many ways. One way is if other members find your bookmarked sites helpful. On Brainify’s website, Goldberg notes that if the company is ever sold, it intends to distribute 30 percent of its sales to members according to their reputation.

For more information, visit www.brainify.com.

Christina Li can be reached at [email protected].