As you know, a lot of admission offices in universities and colleges across the country (and probably the world) have started to use blogs maintained by current students to give to high school students a preview of the college experience at their institutions.
At Ball State University and other institutions, admission offices recruited a few freshmen to share their first-year experiences on their own individual blogs.
College life being what it is – busy and demanding, posts on these individual blogs might not be as regular as they should to catch a real dedicated audience. That’s why the “group-blog” approach adopted at Colgate University and more recently by The University of Sydney (as announced yesterday by Georgina Hibberd) may be the best one.
For ‘gate life or Sydney Life, a handful of freshmen have been recruited to blog their experience on a unique blog – which results in more frequent posts with different voices.
By introducing some kind of competition among the student bloggers – “gosh, she posted twice last week, I’d better find something to blog about today” – I bet that these group blogs end up with more posts than the sum of all posts that would have been posted on every single individual blogs.
I know I’ve been somewhat skeptical about using student-generated blogs as an admissions tool, but I have to praise this particular implementation. Most people don’t blog in a vacuum–they link to, cite, and generally interact with other bloggers. This community approach helps to energize blogs. If a student blogger isn’t getting feedback from their audience of prospective students, at least they can interact with their fellow bloggers. It’s better than blogging alone, and the interaction between bloggers can lead to compelling content. I’d wager that this setup is far superior to a collection of student blogs where the students never interact with each other or even acknowledge the existence of their fellow bloggers.
Thanks for the link Karine, always appreciated.
I think you are right. After the initial boom of everyone having a blog, I think the group blog is a far more effective way of doing it. Content is far more rich. I think people are starting to realise that maintaining a blog is actually a large task!
University of Sydney Group Blog Targets Prospective Students
University of Sydney has launched a group blog by students aimed at providing first-hand information for prospective students. (Link via Templatedata, via Karine Joly’s Collegewebeditor.)
Although the blog’s content has outstanding val…
Rob,
I agree with you in principle, but I don’t observe these particular group bloggers interacting with each other at all. And most modern blogging platforms are designed to promote connections (trackbacks, etc.) regardless of where the blogger happens to be (single or in a group).
Do you think that they’re paying attention to what their fellow group bloggers are blogging?
At the same time, I find it very hard to argue with your observation that it must be “better than blogging alone.” :)
-DK
Full disclosure: I just glanced at the University of Sydney blog before I wrote my response. I was mainly responding to the concept of a group blog, rather than the Sydney blog specifically. That being said, I’ve done some poking around the aforementioned blog and have some further thoughts:
For the most part, Dan, I’d say you’re correct—these bloggers are writing standalone-type entries. They’re not writing entries in response to their fellow bloggers; however, they are commenting on posts by fellow bloggers. Take this post, for instance. Lauren and Catherine (presumably the same Lauren and Catherine that are bloggers on the site) respond to Brendon via comments.
Whether or not this is a beneficial thing is still up for debate. Too much feedback from your own group could lead to an insulated blog where visitors feel like they are outsiders to a conversation happening amongst friends, for instance. But this is a complicated issue, and probably one best saved for a full-blown post.
Group vs. individual blogging
I’ll break my holiday (and GRE)-induced silence to follow up on a conversation that I was having with Dan and Karine on their respective blogs—the idea of group vs. individual blogging. Which is preferable in the context of student-genera…