January 26, 2009   For the tech-savvy, social bookmarking is old hat: Log on to a Web site like Delicious.com, save a few links, and share them with a network of friends. It’s a tool that some students and faculty members have used in the classroom for years.   Now a software developer hopes that a new social-bookmarking site, designed for higher education, will become an indispensable tool for academics. Critics, however, say limiting a networks' membership in that way actually limits the power of bookmarking and defeats its purpose. Brainify.com, the brainchild of Murray Goldberg, creator of WebCT course-management software, was quietly started in beta form last week, after more than a year in development. Like other social-bookmarking sites, it lets users save, share, and rate bookmarks on the site’s network. The way Brainify tries to set itself apart, however, is in its exclusivity, Mr. Goldberg said. Unlike general-interest sites like Delicious, Diigo.com, and Ma.gnolia.com, Brainify restricts membership to those with college e-mail addresses. And rather than link to fried-chicken recipes or the latest YouTube hit, users are likelier to bookmark animated illustrations of particle physics or explications of John Donne’s poetry. “The world needs an academic-bookmarking tool,” Mr. Goldberg said. “Lots of professors are using Delicious ... but there are drawbacks to [bookmarking] in a general forum.” Taking advantage of its defined user network, Brainify will include features tailored to students and faculty members, Mr. Goldberg said. One function allows users to browse bookmarks by academic subject area in categories as specific as “functional and logic programming” and “video ethnography in education research.” Other features, still in development, would build tie-ins to course-management software like Blackboard (which acquired WebCT several years ago) and allow professors to download lists of students’ bookmarks and comments for grading. A ‘Walled Garden’ For some professors already using social bookmarking in the classroom, however, Brainify—at least as it is currently set up—holds limited appeal. Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, said social-bookmarking sites derive their power from the size of their networks. Whether users create collaborative lists of bookmarks or pool research with colleagues, having as many users as possible—whether or not they are interested in higher education—increases the amount of input a user gets, he said. “To artificially limit the size of the community, it artificially limits the use of the product,” said Mr. Scheinfeldt, who is also a history professor at George Mason. Limiting access to those with college e-mail accounts could create a “walled garden,” excluding those not traditionally considered to be part of academe, said Melanie McBride, a new-media consultant who teaches part time at Centennial College, in Toronto. Ms. McBride, who as a part-time instructor is not issued a college e-mail address, said she often brings industry professionals into the classroom and would like to see membership in Brainify open to anybody interested in joining. But Mr. Goldberg said that he wanted to focus on solidifying the site’s functions for students and faculty members before exploring the possibility of expanding membership. “If other students have found a site useful, then that’s exactly the right test,” he said. “As soon as we open up membership for bookmarking to a broader audience, we risk dilution of the quality of the site.” Mr. Goldberg said he hoped to eventually create a central repository of bookmarked knowledge that students and faculty members would go to first for their academic questions. For a generation raised on Wikipedia and Web searches that point to that site first, that may be a tough proposition. Mr. Goldberg does not consider Wikipedia, the online user-written encyclopedia, a competitor and said he would be happy if many Brainify links pointed users to that site. Nonetheless, he thinks that students will be attracted by the hoped-for depth and scale of what may eventually be available through Brainify. “Wikipedia is absolutely the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s available online,” Mr. Goldberg said. "It's only one example of tons of resources … that Brainify will make sense of and organize."   http://chronicle.com/free/2009/01/10124n.htm