Hello, and welcome to another Two to Ponder with Dr.

Gregory McBerry.

Today I want to talk about one of the oldest forms of open recognition.

Sure, everyone is going on about badges and leaderboards and gamification and utilizing audit logs to come up with learning analytics based on open recognition.

But let’s think about the citation.

In a way, adding a citation to your work is one of the oldest forms of open recognition that exists.

Sure, they might end up behind a paywall like a journal or a subscription to a newspaper article, but the concept and the philosophy behind sourcing your material is a form of recognition.

You are saying where you got your idea from.

You’re creating a path of traceability so folks can discover your evidence and who had used it before.

It creates a map of your thinking.

And we can use the citation patterns in very interesting ways.

In academics, they make an H-score, which is how we often track the impact of a journal article, and that is often used in hiring decisions or promotion decisions or tenure decisions.

But it’s also open to manipulation because it is an open form of recognition.

The key is to get at the spirit of citations.

You want to explain where your ideas came from, give your audience the ability to go back and trace those ideas, and also connect to the much larger philosophical underpinnings of your ideas.

So think about it.

When you give credit, it’s good.