When you post your reading responses to the forum, you should always be sure to clearly indicate when your are citing a text and provide information on how your reader can find this citation. This is always the best practice for referencing a text, but it is especially important when you are working online. If you are discussing a passage from one of our readings, you want to be sure that it is clear to your fellow students what passage you are referring to from the books so that there is no confusion about what you are talking about.

The goal of citation is to provide your reader with enough information so that she or he can find the passage you are referring to. On the Web, this can frequently be accomplished by providing a link to the original page where the referenced information is located. When dealing with sources that aren’t on the Web, such as books or magazines or digital ebooks, you need to provide information about the publication (name of the book, name of the author, when it was published, who published it, etc.) as well as the location in the text where the reference can be found, generally a page number.

When citing our course texts, you don’t need the entire citation, but you do need to clearly indicate which text you are referring to and provide page references for all quotations and paraphrases. For example, when quoting from Net Smart you would write:

As Rheingold argues, “learning to live mindfully in cyberculture is as important to us as a civilization as it is vital to you and me as individuals” (p. 1).

If you were to paraphrase this same passage, you should be sure to still give the page reference, like this:

Rheingold argues that mindfulness is vital to both society as a whole as well as to single persons (p. 1).

The same processes should be used when referencing sources outside of the readings, with the addition of either full citation information for print sources (author, title of work, year, and publication information) or a link to the original page for online sources.