Given the Information Futures Commission’s focus on teaching and learning in the Digital Age, I would like to propose that the Project Team include the paper entitled “Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity” as a recommended resource for academic staff.

This paper has recently been published by Dr Kathleen Gray, Dr Celia Thompson (University of Melbourne), Dr Rosemary Clerehan and Dr Judithe Sheard (Monash University) and Dr Margaret Hamilton (RMIT University),in the Internet and Higher Education journal (2008).

It raises questions concerning academic integrity in relation to current referencing and citation style guides and argues that these guides are inadequate to the task. We suggest that traditional concepts of authorship need to be reformed in order to accommodate the collaborative and multi-voiced dimensions of authorship afforded by Web 2.0 authoring tools such as wikis, blogs and social bookmarking.

Please see below for the abstract. The full paper is available.

Abstract:

Web 2.0 authoring forms such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, and audio and video podcasting pose a challenge to academic authorship traditions. This paper reviews the provisions made in major academic referencing and citation style guides for acknowledging content and ideas that may be published using these new web authoring forms. It offers an overview of features of web 2.0 authoring forms and explores concepts of authoring that can help academics to understand the challenges of working with these forms. It provides examples of referencing and citation in scholarly and scientific communication, and concludes that the conceptual basis of referencing and citation as expressed in current systems and standards needs reform in order to bring academic integrity to the use of these new forms of authorship.

Thanks, Celia :-)

The New Media Literacies project at MIT takes what we might call an ‘embedded’ approach to teaching information literacy:

“How does digital copying relate to legacy notions of property? What do I need to know in order to collaborate with my online peers? How do I present myself online? What do I do when I encounter new communities with unfamiliar norms or ideas? In many cases, there are helpful analogies in “age old” practices. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of the analog world can seem like an ill fit. A more appropriate approach might frame the core skills and ethical issues within already established structures, but recognize the complications and opportunities of the contemporary media environment.”

At Harvard, the Good Play project:

“…seeks to understand the ethical issues that youth face in the virtual frontier of new digital media. How models of ethics transfer from the offline to the online world–especially in the five areas of identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation–and how young people understand their roles and responsibilities in digital contexts are key concerns.”

The two project teams met recently to share their experiences, and a summary was published on Henry Jenkins’ blog. Their blog post includes three examples of group exercises that help students work through concepts of responsibility, copyright and privacy.

The report also points to Spotlight, a group blog that publishes weekly articles about “what’s important” in the emerging field of digital media and learning.

The New Media Literacies project is building a ‘learning library’ and looking for partners, collaborators and contributors — see the NML web site for details.

Related posts on this Information Futures blog:

• Literacy, old and new
• Information management at a personal level
• Regardless of age, everyone googles

Missed the forums? No worries — you can ‘attend’ online instead. Videos of both the forums are now available on the Information Futures Commission’s main web site.

We started the forum series with Richard Katz, Vice-President of EDUCAUSE. Richard explored the disruptive effects of information and communication technologies on higher education — from how we communicate routinely with colleagues to questioning the fundamental notion of ‘the university.’

The second Information Futures Forum was presented by Professor Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa. Michael is a leading advocate of providing open access to scholarly information, and an expert on copyright law. I could not attend Michael Geist’s lecture, Unlocking Access – the case for Open Access publishing, so I’m looking forward to hearing what he had to say.

Huge thanks to Jon Peacocke, Ian Shiel,  Ben Loveridge and the rest of the Digital Media Services team for their fabulous video recording and production work.