Blogging at Ball State

Ball State University's student-blogging program is now in its third year, which makes it one of the old ones. Presented under the banner Real Life at Ball State, the blogs are written by 12 undergraduates (4 from each year) and hosted under BSU's domain. I chatted this morning with Nancy Prater, the university's web coordinator, about the program. Here are a few salient points from our conversation:

• For first year of the program (2005-06), BSU got by using Wordpress as its blogging software. "It was ok as a short-term solution to get us through," she told me, "but it wasn't really sophisticated enough for our needs." The IT department had its hands full with a change in content-management systems; it made the most sense to roll that out and then tack on the new blogging platform. Ball State runs its blogs on Community Server.
• BSU used traditional means to promote the blog --- via postcards to prospective students/parents, posters to high-school counselors, plugs in the viewbook and newsletters to parents, and high-visibility links throughout the BSU web site. "We talked it up to parents as much as we did to students," she says.
• By the end of the inaugural semester, the site was drawing nearly 3,000 hits a day. The following spring, traffic spiked to more than 10,000 hits a day. "We started getting comments from people that said things like, 'I've been accepted to Ball State and I'm trying to decide whether to enroll,' or 'I'm coming to Ball State next fall and I have questions about classes or dorms,'" Prater says. "People had reached a certain decision point and were really focused on getting information, and that drove the traffic way, way up."
• In a survey of incoming freshmen and their parents last summer, Ball State learned that the blogs had really had an impact. Readership was quite high, with parents making up a surprisingly large segment of the readership.
• As part of the training that student bloggers receive before they begin writing, Ball State has an attorney from the university counsel's office come down and give a little talk about legal issues such as copyright, libel, and privacy law. There has never been a legal problem arising out of something that a student blogger wrote, Prater says, but that's because Ball State chooses its bloggers carefully and ensures that they're responsible kids.
• "We don't edit the blogs at all," Prater says. "The bloggers get to curse; they get to criticize professors or the administration. That's all important for authenticity. We do make sure that they take into account that their parents are reading what they write, their friends are reading it, future employers can read it. But we want them to be honest."

Prater considers the blogging initiative a great success. "It was a risk, but there's risk in not taking a risk," she says. "For us, it seems to be paying off."

My thanks to Nancy for the input.