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.

dgsact3