Say you've published an item/story/article or learning object/resource to the web and would be delighted to see it referenced or reused elsewhere (with appropriate credits). What about that learning object/resource which may have been created with one context in mind but is being reused in another, perhaps in ways that were never envisaged by the original author? Information about reference or reuse could be as useful as the original object/resource itself, but how can we identify and collate such narratives? Read on if you want to know more. The weblog community shows us one way forward by the use of 'Trackbacks', a feature first introduced in the Movable Type blog engine and now widespread. A 'trackback' automatically notifies an article's originating site that another article has been published on another site that is related and - or - relevant to their post. So, for example, if Site A published an article with say an id of '123' and Site B and C published their own articles then as long as Sites B and C had published their articles with the trackback URL provided by Site A (via its trackback hyperlink) then Site A would automatically be able to aggregate all such notifications. The result is that next time anyone accessed Site A's article id '123' the trackback hyperlink would offer brief summaries of the reference/reuse plus hyperlinks to Sites B and C.
Trackback is also being used outside of the weblog world. The best example of this in practice is probably the Maricopa Learning eXchange's packaging slip which incorporates a trackback feature to facilitate notification of learning object reuse. I like this a lot because, apart from being sociable/community oriented, it should help to build a knowledge-base of use and reuse which is after all the 'holy grail' of the learning object advocates.
I've now incorporated trackbacks into Auricle. If you are using a web application, e.g. weblogs, which support this feature please click on the 'trackbacks' link beneath an article to get the relevant article url for inclusion in your trackbacks field. If the trackbacks link is showing more than 0 references then that means there are cross-references for you to browse.
