Ball State's interactive student recruitment initiative using blogs — online, interactive journals — and podcasts is attracting nationwide attention. The blogs, which are true interactive, multimedia experiences with 12 students posting weekly updates of text, photos, audio and video, can be found at www.bsu.edu/reallife. With audio files and text, RSS feeds can be used so the files can be podcast and listened to via computer or MP3 players.

The story has been covered by USA Today, Associated Press, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), Inside Indiana Business and more than 20 Indiana newspapers including the South Bend Tribune, the Louisville Courier Journal (Indiana edition), Palladium Item (Richmond) and the Herald Times (Bloomington).

"We've been pleased to see so much interest in the initiative," said Tom Taylor, Ball State's vice president of enrollment, marketing, and communications. "Admissions staff on the road are hearing a lot of interest from prospective students. We've also attracted some attention from professional publications in the enrollment management arena, which should result in even more interest in the initiative."

Ball State's uncensored, unscripted, interactive blogs are benefiting the university in a number of ways. They allow professors and administrators to learn, in an unobtrusive way, what things are of interest and importance to students, both through the questions the bloggers receive and through the content they choose to present. The activity itself also conveys a lot of information about Ball State, he added.

"Certainly the technology involved resonates with our recent achievement of being named the number-one wireless campus in the nation by Intel Corporation," Taylor said. "But the nature of blogging — its open and interactive format — speaks to the kind of educational experience our students receive."

The bold experiment is drawing inquiries from other universities around the country. Brian Niles, enrollment and marketing expert, praised the initiative, saying that Ball State is "taking the student blog to the next level." Providing an uncensored blog with the feedback mechanism turned on is a decision that makes "other colleges squeamish."

Others within the profession have praised the site's use of technology: "The Brady-Bunch Flash movie is fantastic! It's the best use of Flash I've seen on an 'edu' Web site," said a public relations specialist from Capital University, Columbus, Ohio. Phone calls and e-mails requesting more information have been accompanying the kudos, said Nancy Prater, Ball State's Web content coordinator.

"Requests from marketing consultants and enrollment and marketing professionals have been fairly steady," she said. "Questions from State University of New York and the University of Cincinnati are representative of the requests — they all want to know how we did it."

An e-mail from an eighth-grader in Gas City, Ind., however, may best exemplify the initiative's success.

"I have been looking at this Web site a lot, and I think Ball State is the college I want to go to," she wrote. "I know I am still young, but I have really big dreams. Please get a hold of me as soon as possible."