The World of Citation

I was going to start this post by saying, "Citation is one of the hardest things I teach" but then I thought about it and realized that there's nothing I teach where I think, "Hey, no problem, everyone understands that immediately." But citation is definitely one of the most frustrating things I teach, because it can be such an abstract idea for students. Why, they want to know, do they have to include all those details? And why would anyone care what order the information was in? Can't they just throw in a title and a URL and be done with it already?

Students do seem to have a sense of why it's important to give credit to their sources, and I do use (and love) NoodleTools to help them with the citation process, but I was still getting a lot of push back on the "why" of the details citation. I was struggling to come up with good way to make it click for my students ("just because" wasn't cutting it, explanation-wise, and for good reason).

I love teaching with analogies, and I had managed to develop several good analogies to explain different parts of the search process (most of them involve food. I know my audience), but a citation analogy eluded me. Until, out of nowhere (probably while processing books, which is when I do some of my best thinking), it came to me.

A citation is like the source's address.

Of course! I put together a quick presentation for students the next day--after all, I was convinced the idea was brilliant, but it might fall flat with students. I started by putting up the school's address, but all jumbled up, and asked if they could tell me what it was. They knew it was the school's address, of course, but also recognized it wasn't in the right format. No big deal, of course--unless someone tried to send them a care package to the messed up address, and it never got here because the post office couldn't figure out what was going on.

I then put up a jumbled address from somewhere in New York City. It was easy to tell it was a New York address; then I revealed it was the address of the LEGO store in Rockefeller Center. If you were able to decipher the address, you'd be able to get somewhere awesome.

It seemed to be clicking with students, and I've been working on the analogy since. Most kids have seemed to connect with it, and it's provided a good way to frame discussions about what needs to be in a citation.

Why do they need to include the year of publication? Because it's part of the address.
Why don't they copy and paste the URL from a database source? Because it's bad directions.
Why do we need in-text citations? They're a sign post for your reader.

Then I hit up my Social Studies department for a spare map (I was too impatient to order one). I was hoping for a US map; they only had a world map, but I think it worked out even better. I also had some giant thumbtacks I'd gotten for Christmas, which makes the display 3-D (sort of). The slides below are a more refined version of my presentation, including pictures of my World of Citation display.

World of citation

(This is, for the record, also the first time I've used SlideShare.)

This is, in my humble opinion, the most awesome citation-themed bulletin board ever. It's also getting lots of attention and questions from students, which is really cool. Who ever thought a display about citation could be a conversation starter?