To link or not to link? Really, that’s the question?

I’m strongly in favor of linking here.  I can understand Mr.Carr’s point in his article against hyperlinking in the text.  He claims it’s distracting. Hyperlinking in the text causes people to click from link to link until they end up five pages away from the original page. Still, despite being the victim to an occasional clicking jaunt,  I still prefer my links in the text.  I actually treat them as I would a highlighter on the web.  I think it’s great that it’s already done for me and I’m sure anyone with a little curiosity in there bones feels the same way. Without the hyperlink right there in the text I would waste time finding my text again and then matching it up with the proper footnote. It does take a little self discipline of being able to finish one thing before moving onto another. But leave that up to the reader and their own learning styles and ability to focus. As far as I can tell hyperlinks are really just doing what footnotes wish they could.  We should be singing praises to the hyperlink for helping us along and saving us time when we want to look a little deeper into an author and their sources.

Professionally I believe linking is an especially useful tool when working with students.  Hyperlinks help to show students the importance of citing references in a more accessible and convenient. It also gives them a quick and easy way to look deeper into a subject if they are so inclined.  I use hyperlinks for handouts and references to artist on my classroom blog all of the time.  Without hyperlinks helping to keep all of that information at my students fingertips I would expect to be flooded with a lot more questions and papers to shuffle thank I have time for.

I would have to say that when it comes the argument of linking or not I very much fall in favor of Mathew Ingram, who uses many interesting links to back up his argument but most of all I agree with him when he wrote:

“not including links (which a surprising number of web writers still don’t) is in many cases a sign of intellectual cowardice. What it says is that the writer is unprepared to have his or her ideas tested by comparing them to anyone else’s, and is hoping that no one will notice. In other cases, it’s a sign of intellectual arrogance — a sign that the writer believes these ideas sprang fully formed from his or her brain.”

It seems to me that if we want any sort of respect for the things that we are writing then we should be providing links to the things that we are referring to and the articles that helped us to form our decisions.  I would want that from the authors what I am reading so why should my readers expect any less from me.