Citations and References vs. Hyperlinks

Hi everyone,

This post finds me in Houston, sipping my second double tall latte at a Starbucks. In a few hours I begin the 14 hour travel home to Ireland. Thanks to everyone who saw me present and who helped my ideas about participatory action research and its relations to dissertation work evolve. I promise to write about those ideas in the next weeks.

For today my musings focus on the communication factor between writers and readers and the use of citations and references to help that transference of resources. I love to learn. I want to know the resources others are working with - and as I learn to write blogs efficiently I find that hyperlinks naturally insert themselves in much the same ways I use citations and references in my formal writing.

What I hint at here is that there is life after APA! I think students would struggle less with reference styles and where and when to use citations if they would imagine them as hyperlinks to the resources with which they have recently been working. For example you would naturally put in the hyperlink the first time you mentioned a resource and you would be unlikely to link to the same place over and over in the paragraph. Both rules are true for citations as well.

When I write a blog I consciously use the links to help my readers go off on their own tangents of ideas and distributed learning web walks - hoping they come back and share, starting a great asynchronous conversation. I will also go back at the end of a blog and see if there are resources to which I may want to link my ideas for the fun and interest of my reader. Unfortunately I learned citation and references more as a way to "prove" something in the academic world, and I have to laugh that what was frequently shown is how much I was struggling with citations and references! (lol)

While I don't have the answers here, and I haven't had the time to research whether others are writing on a similar subject, I hope these thoughts provoke a personal voice in other writers as they use both the tools of citations, and hyperlinks. For myself, the journey to life long learning has taken a sudden uphill turn and I am likely to find myself back tracking those ideas to their sources - and beyond! I look forward to your comments - just follow the link below.

I hope everyone is having a fabulous day,
Alana