Citing Sources: Berry-Picking Example

One important thing to let students know about when publishing to their blogs is that they need to provide details about where they found their sources, and not borrow large sections of content from other bloggers.

Deep Linking, the act of creating links from your blog to specific pages of others’ web sites or blog posts, is a useful way to connect to others’ ideas, but we need to remind learners to always cite their sources, and introduce the links as belonging to someone else. There should also always be some context surrounding why that link was selected, how it was found, and a brief description of its significance. In addition, we need to provide ourselves clues for future reference letting us know a scale of reliability and credibility. Is this a resource that starts us off looking for more in-depth, more reliable sources, or is it suspect and better discarded?

Here’s an example of the act of berry-picking:

I found about this particular resource about legal issues for bloggers from the TLSTLN course through Athabasca Landing. Mark McCutcheon wrote a brief post about blogging law.

Site Name: Aviva Directory

Title: Blogger Law

Author: Unknown

Date of Post: Unknown

Relevance: interesting content, introduces some legal terms, but covers it from US legal context.

Reliability Scale: Unknown, maybe a 6 out of 10. I don’t know who wrote the article, and cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information. It does not seem to have a date either, except for a copyright notice dating back to 2007, and there is apparently a number of other links unconnected to the topic.