Redefining the Guidance Office

The new information environment: Redefining the Guidance Office

The world of wikis, blogs, aggregators, used defined content, RSS and the like present power to produce, disseminate and refine information like never before.

These tools give us the ability to provide students with up to date, relevant content and more importantly, give them the ability expand upon that knowledge and contribute to the knowledge base. No longer are the guidance counselor and school catalogs be the only source of information. Students now have the ability to communicate independently and collaboratively while the get information directly from the source, those who lived it. If you want an example of what life at U of I is like, go to technorati.com and find blogs from those who are or have been to U of I. Set up Bloglines to update you on stories in the school newspaper. Find blogs on the Big Ten... on what life is like in Champaign, IL. Take that information and compare it with similar sites at other schools. The amount of information is staggering.

There is however, a potential downside to this new free communication. When everyone has a voice and all are equally loud, there is potential to obscure the legitimate from those less so. At this point, little can guarantee that information online is correct. Many times already "spin doctors" have manipulated information so that the same story from two different sources resemble each other in few ways. Specific to high school age students, too often a site's credibility on the web is evaluated more by its appearance than by the validity of its sources. If it is cool and in "print" it must be correct.

For that reason I must conclude that there is, and for the foreseeable future will be, no substitute for the human element in guiding kids toward thier futures. These cyber-tools are wonderful things and we need to use them to provide the best and most meaningful experiences for our students, but they can not replace the face to face interaction that counseling is based upon. In fact, it is likely that the personal relationship will become more important as we help student decipher the intricacies of the information tidal wave.

These tools give us great power in as we move further into the information age... with great power comes great responsibility.

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What do you think of RSS?

My first thought as I contemplate the question is that I am beginning to have trouble keeping the different acronyms, utilities and websites straight.

In that I believe that RSS is the constant status update of pages in which I am interested. This is a valuable tool. Part of why I have not spent a great deal of time reading blogs is the sheer volume of material and the seeming inability to know what has changed without visiting each page. RSS and Bloglines makes that much easier to follow and in turn make getting relevant information that much more usable.

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Inaugural Entry

Question for the class: What is the difference between information and knowledge?

Information and knowledge are related but distinct concepts. Information is often little more than "raw data", a conglomeration of facts, ideas, observations and the like. Knowledge, on the other hand, is the ability to place that "raw data" into context.

It is difficult to say in a black-and-white fashion which is most important. They are interconnected, interrelated and in a perfect world, interdependent. It is difficult, but not impossible to do mush with either without the other. As a partnership, they are essential to communication.

Facts in themselves are often of minimal value without the appropriate context and framework of the situation. As an example, consider the information that the project you are working on lacks a necessary euphonium. This knowledge is of little benefit if you have no idea what a euphonium is, what it does, or where to find one. (As a supply officer in the military I ran into this kind of challenge frequently)

By contrast, if you know that your project is conducting a symphony, that context would increase the likelihood that what you are looking for is a muscial instrument. If you knew one of the musicians in the brass section is screaming that his instrument is missing, you could probably narrow down that what you are indeed looking for is a brass instrument. Without the context, the knoweldge of what is going on, the facts are not terribly illuminating.

On the other hand, you would be in a difficult situation indeed if you were conducting a musical concert and did not know the names of the instruments. Imagine trying to explain that you need one of those "big shiny brass thingy's that you blow into and it makes a loud noise". Without information, the fact in this case the name of the instrument, the context is of value but sadly lacking.

Information and knowledge are essential components of human understanding.

Time is short, to be continued...

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