NGRF - UK National Guidance Research Forum

While this project has some very useful things to say, I do not feel that it necessarily gets to the bottom of what it means to use the web for guidance purposes: the ethical considerations are important but do not specifically identify how the actual design of a web site for careers guidance would differ in ways that reflect guidance principles. In other words, the Ariadne project as a whole seems to have collected a number of general principles about good web site/page design but they apply to more or less any use of the web, not specifcally to guidance. This is a common failing of such research (particularly at a European level, where the UK is actually ahead of other EU countries in its use of ICT in guidance and lowest common denominator factors prevail as a result). By contrast the second part of "Report on the CSU/NICEC Careers Service Web site design project 2001-2003" (Offer, M.S., 2003, Graduate Prospects, Manchester) and chapters in "Careers Services: Technology and the Future" (Offer, M, Sampson, J.P. Jr., and Watts, A.G., CSU, Manchester, 2001, directly address the actual guidance issues in detail and in ways that are more explicitly testable by research (e.g into usability of the templates developed in the former case or the practicality of the principles enunicated in the latter). Too often, it seems to me, we are in danger of overlooking how much practical experience we have in the UK to draw on in this field, especially in the area of HE careers services' use of the web and related technologies in the last few years! See also the documents filed in the resources section of this part of the NGRF.

Marcus Offer, NICEC.