To blog or not to blog: some IHEs embrace the power and vitality of weblogs, while others approach them with a wary eye

THIS FALL A COUPLE DOZEN STUDENTS ACROSS THE United States took up blogging for their alma maters. In occasional or weekly posts they offer slices of campus life that the Admissions office can share with prospective students and their parents. Because these are blogs and not recruiting brochures, the writers have a chance, it seems, to tell it like it is.

But for readers accustomed to the rough-and-ready informality of many blogs, these new websites are curious creations. Press releases have typically preceded the writers, and education reporters, at least briefly, followed them. Most new bloggers labor in obscurity, taking months to build their writing skills and attract an audience, but thanks to the links from the Admissions page, these sponsored sites had readers from the start.

The financial and editorial arrangements vary. Some bloggers receive a stipend for posting at least once a week, while others receive the computer, digital camera, or audiovisual equipment they need to create a high-tech blog site. No matter how they are compensated, bloggers are a peculiar kind of employee, practicing an individualist's art on behalf of the school.

Press releases and admissions sites present their blogs as "authentic, firsthand accounts of student life." They promise "an inside look" at "the real lives" of small groups of students who are carefully chosen to represent the diversity of the student body.

One blogger, for example, frequently reports on leaving campus to attend professional sporting events, while another graciously answers questions from prospective students. Another details the busy life of the student athlete, while still another publishes a dramatic picture of new bullet holes in his off-campus student apartment complex. Some posts are exciting or promising, and some even talk about ideas--but administrators are anxious about the risk.

Can student bloggers create an image attractive enough to engage and recruit new students? Should valuable space on the admissions website be turned over to self-expression? Administrators are watching cautiously to see how these young people represent the school.

A Generation Gap

Lori Croy, manager of Web Communications at the University of Missouri, Columbia, has worked in web design since 1995. She says that the two generations think of blogs very differently. Croy notes, for example, the "sheer embarrassment people on the management side would feel if a journalism student used poor grammar or punctuation," since this might be seen as a "direct reflection on the faculty's ability to teach properly."

But many young writers, especially those not on the university payroll, see their blogs differently. "They are an informal way to communicate, not a collection of polished and copyedited material. We have a way to go before one generation understands blogs the way the other understands them," says Croy.

Croy's work is involved not so much with blogging itself as it is with the influence that blogs and other new media might have on the future of campus web design.

"Administrators may not be comfortable with a blogger's spontaneity taking place on their major communication channel," she notes, but they are very much interested in the energy, speed, and focus seen in good blogging. A content management system, the far more powerful and expensive cousin of high-end blogging software, can take IHEs further into the age of dynamic campus web content.

Frozen in Time

Not too long ago, most university webpages were static objects created by wrapping HTML code around a collection of words and images. The process often relied on a department's web enthusiast typing code and posting individual and often idiosyncratic pages that remained unchanged until the next burst of coding and posting.

Today, stock logos and page templates standardize large portions of an institution's website, strengthening the brand and vanquishing idiosyncratic pages. Still, most department pages depend on the diligence of a single writer for updates.

The faculty may be active, publishing research and innovating in the classroom, but the department webpage often goes unchanged for weeks or months. Multimillion-dollar segments of the institution appear to be frozen in time.

Students, however, operate at a different speed. Many organize their lives informally with e-mail or instant messaging. They get their news from sites like MyYahoo or Google News that are updated throughout the day. Their favorite blogs have new posts at the top of the page each time they visit, with some even offering photos, videos, of podcasts.

Students no longer live in the age of the static webpage, even if their university does. Croy believes that campuses too must offer "content deployed in multiple media."

With that goal in mind, a university that doesn't dare blog can still learn a few things from the blogger generation.

Doing What Blogs Do

Whether it's written by a witty cultural studies professor or a dedicated news junkie, a good blog usually includes links to other websites. The blogger quotes from and annotates other blogs in an informal fashion that many a scholar would nevertheless recognize.

Good bloggers do quite a bit of work to present, perhaps even organize, a body of knowledge for their readers, and they write every day. They respond quickly to news and discussions as they unfold across the web. By practice and by design, there is always fresh content at the top of a blog.

Experienced bloggers read widely and know most of the other writers who cover their topic; they list the best of these sites in their sidebar. In time, skillful bloggers build a community of readers and writers who focus on their shared concerns. Bloggers often use RSS feeds--a type of web formatting--to make their content viewable in multiple formats for new audiences.

By most of these standards, some student recruiting sites are online diaries, not blogs. But Missouri's undergraduate admissions site, Croy says, strives for some of those blog-ish virtues. The site (http://admissions.missouri.edu) focuses on student voices in a series of rotating interviews that offer "18 Reasons to Choose Mizzou."

The main page offers gateway links that take visitors to well-aimed pages that reassemble and republish campus information in order to serve the overlapping and contrasting needs of particular audiences, such as parents or transfer students. The Missouri site balances the young audience's preference for a fast-moving web experience with their need for practical information.

A Campus Blog

While there are bloglike ways to improve a university website, the question remains: Can a campus risk having a real blog? Some are making a serious effort.

For example, Indiana University South Bend is one of the 200 member schools participating in the American Association of State Colleges and Universities' American Democracy Project (ADP). The project is a three-year initiative to strengthen civic education in member schools' curriculum and co-curriculum.

IU South Bend's ADP programs include a blog (www.iusb.edu/~sbadla) that publishes column-length pieces most weekdays on matters of public policy, the challenges and rewards of active citizenship, and the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy. Writers discuss local, national, and global aspects of those topics as well as their implications for public and higher education.

The ADP blog is a general university publication, not a scholarly journal, and it does not publish traditional academic writing. Instead, most of the pieces would fit well on a good op-ed page. The blog aims at balance by including writers from across the political spectrum. Readers can join in by commenting on individual pieces, writing their own pieces, or submitting reading suggestions, letters, or provocative quotations.

Posts by professors are often informed by their scholarship, but these and other writers also gain authority by testing ideas against personal and community experience. On the blog, what counts as knowledge is not settled by the word of a university expert. This attitude is appropriate and necessary for the subject of democracy.

Faculty authors are not always comfortable working this way. Political scientists tend to avoid studying local politics, biologists are not often accustomed to speaking about the intelligent design controversy with a general audience, and English professors may be more comfortable deciphering literary than political speech. Many faculty members are tempted by the anonymity of their private lives and leave democratic exchange to others. The university, too, has not decided how to value this kind of writing and publishing.

Nevertheless, the ADP blog gains new writers each semester. Regular and occasional authors have included students, faculty, staff, and members of the community. This fall the blog has published many reports from sociologist Scott Sernau as he circled the world, teaching global issues courses for the Semester al Sea program. Judging by the page visits, some of the most popular entries have been the related bibliographies created by the university's librarians.

The ADP blog has learned the lessons of republishing, too. The blog occasionally secures permission to republish writing from other publications, such as Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow's recent Boston Globe column on teaching the value of service. Each week one of the best pieces from the blog is broadcast on the region's National Public Radio affiliate station WVPE, and some of these pieces are rebroadcast by other NPR stations across the state. Some pieces have been republished in the local newspaper, the South Bend Tribune. A media exchange site shares content with other radio stations and newspapers in the state. Increasingly, the blog's pieces reach a wider audience through republishing.

The blog includes links to other publications and web resources, a calendar of campus and area events related to IU's themes, and MP3 audio files from the radio pieces. As participation and readership grows, the ADP site slowly comes into its own as a real, full-featured blog.

Since it's a university publication, the ADP blog has needed a policy about the strong language and aggressive tone found on some political blogs. The appropriate content policy calls for a standard of decorum appropriate for a good classroom discussion. In spite of its generality, the guideline is clear to most participants. Only occasionally have submissions been rejected because of a personal attack or inappropriate content.

Promising Results

In the first year, more than 100,000 visits were recorded at the main page of IUSB's American Democracy Project blog, with many thousands more at other portions of the site--not bad for a community of South Bend's size. Writers from both campus and community often contribute work without being asked.

The radio station reports that the commentaries are popular with listeners and that about 15,000 radios are tuned in at the times of broadcast. And the university is named as the source of each of these broadcasts.

But there are weaknesses, too. The variety of authors provides freshness but has at times prevented a sense of continuity among the pieces. It's difficult to keep the site balanced between left, center, and right-wing political opinions. Some faculty members are not used to making local ties to their area of expertise, and some disciplines rarely contribute to the site. And as on other blogs, some pieces provoke no comments from readers.

Nevertheless, the ADP blog provides a place for faculty to develop their skills as public intellectuals writing for and serving a wider audience. The site models and builds active citizenship among students and engages the university with the community in a democratic exchange informed by local experience as well as by the academic disciplines of the faculty. Like all promising blogs, it's a work in progress.

RELATED ARTICLE: Write once, publish again and again.

GOOD WEB PUBLISHING SOFTWARE CAN DRAW TEXT and images from a database and automatically dress them differently for different audiences. It allows users to:

* Speak to diverse constituencies by repackaging and re publishing the best content from across the website in areas aimed at the needs and interests of these users.

* Offer and use RSS syndication feeds to widen the readership.

* Repackage and republish for recruiting students. Parents and high school students, for example, may not be well served by a single admissions website.

* Establish several versions of the main Admissions webpages with designs appropriate for the age and interests of the intended readers. There should be considerable overlap in content, but one audience may take a keener interest in the rugby club than another does.

* Repackage and republish for the local community alumni, students, faculty, and staff. Announce a distinguished guest lecture in the events calendar, feature it on a news page, and preserve it on a page that celebrates the highlights of campus intellectual life. A list of resources for troubled students should appear in web areas aimed at students, faculty, and staff.

* Let others repackage and republish. When news, sports, and press re[ease pages include syndication feeds, tech-savvy readers will be able to gel new content automatically in free news-aggregator software such as Bloglines.

* Pipe news headlines into many parts of the site. Good web publishing software will let users sort and deliver news items by syndication feed to different areas of a site. Properly categorized, a headline announcing a new life sciences grant, for example, can appear automatically on the pages used by both science and medical faculty.

RELATED ARTICLE: Beyond the viewbook.

JASON PONTIUS RECOGNIZES THE APPEAL OF bloggers' dynamic sites and authentic voices for promotion and recruiting. Pontius is president of White Whale Web Services (www.whitewhale.net), a company specializing in website design for universities.

Blogging is a very hip term right now," he says. "Universities try to communicate in an authentic voice, but blogging may not be the way to do it."

More familiar genres bring their limitations, too, however. A viewbook, the classic promotional tool, often cloaks a lively campus in glossy static images and slogans. An online version can use database software to create dynamic pages, and good writing can sweep away the slogans and point to the excitement of campus life.

Inspired in part by the liveliness of blogs, Pontius talks about "looking into the hive," a metaphor that has guided the company's work on sites such as the Brown University research website (http://research.brown.edu). A good website will show donors, for example, "a working, active, busy environment, a hive where a tot of good work is being done."

Pontius believes that when site visitors get a look into the hive, prospective students may apply, prospective donors may write checks, and faculty members feel well represented and well served.

"Faculty members go there to look up policies and grant deadlines," he says, "but the website shows them the commercialization of faculty research, ii shows how the university looks to external audiences and gives the impression to faculty that Brown is working for them."

The site's centerpiece is the interactive five-paneled main column that draws from a well-stocked database of texts and images and offers new glimpses into Brown research each time it is visited.

The panels feature research news, faculty profiles, and articles on major programs. A visitor can refresh the browser of click on a panel link for more articles to appear. Though it isn't a blog, visitors accustomed to blogs see something here that they value: a focused, fast-moving, content-rich site that reflects a dynamic institution.

Ken Smith teaches writing for the web at Indiana University South Bend. He edits the university's American Democracy Project weblog, as well as his own "Weblogs in Higher Education" blog (www.mchron.net/site/edublog.php).

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