Wow, our first citation!

A weird thing happened the other day. I was on my Google+ profile, looking to get the URL for my Google Reader Shared Items. By mistake I tapped on the URL for my google scholar profile and I noticed that one of my articles had a citation. A citation? A citation! For one of my co-authored articles? It seemed so!  But who would cite us?

Don't get me wrong, I believe that the quality of the work I put out, and the quality of work that my collaborators put out, is exceptional. On the other hand, I am a young academic and I really don't expect anyone to be citing us this soon. The paper that was cited was our recent IRRODL paper on Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education and it was cited in Levy & Schrire's The Case of a Massive Open Online Course at a College of Education.

I have to say, in addition to excitement (about getting cited), I also had a small degree of paranoia.  I know my information is out there, heck I maintain  various public profiles including Google+,  LinkedIn, Scribd and Google Scholar; and if you Google my name the first 3 pages are about me (it seems so anyway), so I don't know why I was initially treating this as a "who's looking for me? what do they want? get off my lawn!" case ;-) Perhaps I need to go back and recenter on the good things of humanity, and try to ignore any imagined cyberstalking :-)

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