OK, so I’ve managed to do a couple of blog posts now. But the hardest thing so far is somewhat unexpected. How do I do references in a good way on a blog? Should I have a list of references at the end? Should I insert a full citation at every point I want to make a reference? Should I just add links? Links are not that nice, especially not when a subscription is required to read. Should I refuse to use non open access sources? And what then to do about print sources like books?
And please don’t tell the students I try to teach proper referencing about my problems. Or the researchers that ask me questions about reference management.
Or perhaps it’s OK that I don’t know. But any hints and tips for good practice would be appreciated.
I keep trying to decide whether I should start this post of with some kind of explanation, or if I should just jump in and write a short comment on some of the course material for ONL181. The ONL181 course is the reason I started this blog, and we’ll see how much I write here except for course writing. But one of the first topic suggestions was to share a bit of our online journeys and I thought that could serve as an introduction of me. So I’m just putting this at the start of the blog to get me started and avoid an experience as disappointing as the one had by Dennis Upper (1974).
One of the suggested readings was an article by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011) . There was also a couple of related videos that I quickly lost interest in – so much music and walking around and very little content – not even turning the speed up to 1.25 helped very much so I stuck with the text. The text, on the other hand, I found interesting. I’ve always disliked the digital natives narrative, though my reasons to do so were mainly personal. When I first read about the visitors and residents a couple of years back in a blog post for Jisc written by Donna Lanclos (2016) I immediately found the model more appealing, but I never went on to read the original source by White and Le Cornu. My reasons for disliking the idea of digital natives were mainly personal – I’m too old to be a digital native, but still I had an online residency before social media was even something anyone had heard of. I lived an large part of my life online from about when I was 15 to around 25, even though towards the end of that period I had met most of the people I interacted with regularly both online and offline. Since then, life outside the online world has seen more appealing, and I simply haven’t had time and energy to spend to maintain more than a very sporadic online presence. These days, I’m much more likely to use a visitor approach to being online. I’m still quite able to use online tools for most things when I need it, but a lot of the time, I just don’t see the benefit of engagement. I just prefer to think of it as something I choose, rather than being the only way things could be based on when I was born. I moved out, and I go back mostly as a visitor.
Photo by Benjie Dutton used under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Sources
Lanclos, D. (Feb 23, 2016) The death of the digital native: four provocations from Digifest speaker, Dr Donna Lanclos, Jisc. Available here
Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 7(3), 497-497. Available here
White, D. S. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). Available here
Intercalat-ed 