Be where the students are

... a simple and clear directive from the strategic plan of our Vice President Student's Office. At first glance, it makes sense that any college or university Career Centre should embed their programs and resources into the fabric of our student's daily lives. But what if that fabric is made up of hours upon hours of fragmented and depersonalized online interaction? The 2005 ECAR (Educause Center for Applied Research) Study of Students and Information Technology, estimates that students are spending an average of 15 hours per week on-line - excluding their time spent on cellphones. Is it really in our own and our student's best interest to join this bandwagon? - to offer on-line resume workshops; instant-chat career advising; virtual career fairs; Facebook networking events and so on? I'm not so sure and here's why:

The more personal the issue, the more students need our personalized attention.
Students who take the time to engage in our programs and services are concerned with a very important and personal question: "What should I do with the rest of my life?" While very few students present us with this underlying concern, in the hands of a trained and skilled career advisor the question becomes uncovered and, more importantly the answers become discovered. When you take the human out of the equation, students are left gathering bits of information from anonymous sources - how to write a cover letter, lists of employers, frequently asked questions etc.. What technology can't do is to tie all of these disparate pieces together to answer the bigger and far more important questions for and with our students.

Just because students are using the technologies doesn't mean they prefer them.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Robert Kvavik, co- author of the ECAR (Educause Centre of Applied Research) study of Students and Information Technology. The interviewer asked Mr. Kvavik to comment on the most surprising findings from the 2005 study of Students and Information Technology

We hear all this hype about digital natives and millennial students, and then find that they only had a moderate preference for technology in the classroom,. I was surprised that they were not more aggressive about the use of technology. When you look at the qualitative data, they want to be linked in the network, but they want a lot of face-to-face time. At this point, technology is not pedagogically transformational. It makes some evolutionary changes in the way students are taught, so the students may be thinking that if there isn’t that much of a learning difference they’d prefer the faculty just do what they do best and what they are most comfortable with, which is to be in front of them.

I would guess that student's preference for a lot of face-to-face time is not only within the confines of their academic courses. Like our faculty counterparts, lets continue to "do what we do best and are most comfortable with, which is to be in front of them."