You are reading the fifth issue of “The Hub,” the ITS newsletter that is by, for, and about ITS. The goal of this publication is to provide each other with timely information about the services and activities of our department and to support the ITS community. Submit your stories and announcements to its_communications@unc.edu by 5 p.m. Friday, March 4th, to be included in the March 8th issue.
If you’ve recently heard people talk about SACS, it’s not the store, but the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Every 10 years, UNC-Chapel Hill undergoes the re-accreditation process to ensure that the University is meeting or exceeding compliance and core requirements. ITS staff members are working with the Office of Institutional Research to help create the online repository of the needed documentation that will be reviewed by SACS early next year. Other ITS staff members are collecting information and writing documentation as part of the preparations.–MB
Over a hundred and fifty bloggers and blog users gathered on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus February 12 for the 2005 Triangle Bloggers Conference. The large attendance of this event is an indication of the growing popularity and impact of Weblogs.
The conference included presentations, discussion forums, and opportunities for networking in the blog community. Anton Zuiker, a blogger as mistersugar.com, introduced the first session, “Building a Community around Your Blog.” To illustrate different kinds of community, Anton had three speakers briefly describe their blogs:
Ben, Ed, and Sid offered these thoughts on blogs:
The theme of community ran thoughout the conference, and the final session, introduced and moderated by Paul Jones, was titled “Using Blogs to Create Community.” Dan Gillmor, author, former technology columnist, and head of Grassroots Media Inc., made a brief presentation on grassroots journalism and the rest of the session was spent in general discussion.
The attendees at the conference were interested in hearing what other bloggers are doing and in learning new ideas for using blogs to communicate. In addition to the useful and practical information exchanged, there was a lot of interest in the possibilities for blogs. Special interest groups use blogs to correct or emphasize information. Journalists read them. As with other sources of information on the Web, readers need to consider whether what is published is true. However, blogs are undeniably important in presenting information.
If you’re interested in experimenting with blogging, “Installing Movable Type to Personal Space at UNC” in the Help Site provides information on installing Movable Type to help you get started.
In addition to the links on the Conference page, here are two more:
The Long Tail - blog
The Long Tail - article in Wired Magazine
Anton Zuiker and Paul Jones, of ITS and ibiblio, organized the event with support from these sponsors: ibiblio, mistersugar.com, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Support was also provided by Fred Stutzman, TJ Ward, and John Joseph Bachir, all with ibiblio. –DBM
It can take several weeks to schedule a visit from UNC’s official ergonomist. Fortunately, many of the changes he’d recommend are things you can do for yourself, at no or low cost. And there’s a lot more to it than the ubiquitous wrist rests of the 1980s.
Ian Bertmaring thought he wanted to be an engineer. But a class on human factors in design in his junior year of college redirected his interests to engineering work spaces for the people who occupy them. Several years and a master’s degree later, he’s Carolina’s official ergonomist.
Pronounce it like “economist.” An ergonomist is an expert in “the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of the interactions among human and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance,” wrote the International Ergonomics Association Executive Council in August 2000. Or, to give a converse example, someone who gave only a little thought to human factors is the reason that after nearly three years, I still have to study the control knobs on my stove to turn on the burner I want. The knobs are a little bit angled, ostensibly to mirror the positions of the burners, but not angled enough for me to make an intuitive connection.
But back to work: With a change in workspaces, I called Ian to see if my new digs were as healthful as they could be. He’s busy responding to referrals from the Occupational Health Clinic, the Equal Opportunity Office, and doctors in private practice, as well as to questions from people like me, but he agreed to come over for an evaluation. Still, the earliest he could get to me–since I wasn’t suffering pain from my workstation or assignments–was three weeks after I called.
The first thing he did was to videotape me. For about 15 minutes, he shot digital images of me just doing my thing, which that morning was mostly responding to e-mails and trying to think of other common tasks I could demonstrate for him. It wasn’t too unnerving; I just got that funny little chill up my back of someone watching. Very closely.
Ian explained that he would use the digital images to carefully evaluate my work postures as he made his recommendation. However, even before he reviewed the video, he was able to make several specific improvements in my work area, based on having observed my work and on an extensive interview he conducted about such things as corrective lenses (yes), handedness (I’m left-handed and left-eyed, but right-footed), and how long I’d been at this job.
The three main characteristics, or ergonomic stressors, that Ian considers are the force required to complete a task, any awkward or static working postures adopted in completing a task, and the repetitiveness of a task. These factors, alone or in combination, may place someone at greater risk for discomfort. Having an ergonomist evaluate the factors and make recommendations for change can not only prevent or ease pain for employees, but also make them more productive, because their work stations are designed for the way their bodies function. In particular, there are standards for how things like chairs, monitors, keyboards, mice, telephones, and lights should function; where documents should be placed; and how often eyes and arms and brains should rest (30 seconds a couple of times an hour is ideal).
To my surprise, Ian adjusted my chair. I always thought it was perfect, but it turns out I was half falling out of it most of the time, and therefore spending my energy fighting gravity instead of wrestling with words. He then lowered my monitor, re-centered my keyboard, and moved my telephone. All of that was free. His report of my workstation also suggests something called a mouse bridge, so that I don’t have to hyperextend my arm to use the control, and some software programs that will remind me to stretch often and show me how to do it. The report names some suppliers and price ranges; most of the costs are a very reasonable $20 or so.
Want to check your work area for good ergonomics? Visit http://ehs.unc.edu/workplace_safety/ergonomics/index.shtml for links explaining the topic in work and non-work contexts, lists of products, and a summary brochure (available in either Word or pdf format). The brochure is a great place to start. Print it out, grab a buddy to get an objective viewpoint of your posture, and work through the areas highlighted. You have only that nagging tension in your shoulders to lose.–LJB
Each day hundreds of people call the University Operators at 962-2211 to ask a wide range of questions. And the ITS Communications Center Operators answer all of those calls. From “Where can I park for the game?” to “What is the phone number for the Romance Languages department?” to “How do you make a baloney sandwich?” there is almost no question this group of ITS staff members hasn’t heard.
Last fall, to centralize call centers, the Communications Center Operators moved from the Telecommunications work space in Giles Horney to the ITS Response Center area in the Undergraduate Library, but they have a long and rich history in several locations around town. At least as far back as the 1950s, the Chapel Hill Telephone Company, which began as a family-owned company in a private home, routed inquiries for both town and gown numbers. “There was maybe one person per shift then,” says Belinda Caldwell, Communications Center Supervisor, whose memories of the phone company go back to the late 1960s. “A little old lady and she did everything.” The telephone company expanded to employ over 30 people at a Rosemary Street location; operators then used “cord boards” similar to those in Lily Tomlin’s famous sketches. With a move to the Bennett Building in 1974 and affiliation with Southern Bell in 1977, that equipment was replaced with Nortel cord boards that also had three switches at the bottom, the new generation of telephone technology. Carolina bought the campus directory service back from Southern Bell in 1978, requiring only eight operators in two shifts to handle calls, and moved the Center to Giles Horney in 1998.
Now back on central campus, the Operators route calls from campus, state, and national callers to all departments, schools, and centers at UNC-Chapel Hill. They’ve come a long way since cord boards. Each workstation is equiped with T-Metrics software that accesses a phone directory database (updated daily by ITS Telecommunications). When a call comes in to the Communications Center, an Operator answers the call, listens to the customer’s inquiry, and routes the call directly to the corresponding University unit. All calls are tracked as to length and time of call. The Communications Center staff also provide campus members with Meet-Me conference call numbers and assistance. The center is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m and on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The UNC Campus Operators–Phyllis Alston, Belinda Caldwell, Linda Carver, La’Jaynees Gilchrist, Cynthia Haymer, Jay Hurdle, Kerry McCoy, Cynthia Snipes, and Margaret Turner–have a combined University service record of over a century. Their customer service skills are often the first impression callers have of the University.
The next time you see 962-2211 at the bottom of the unc.edu home page, remember that that key campus communication point is part of ITS. And send pleasant thoughts their way as they try to find John Edwards’ new office telephone number!–MB with LJB and Belinda Caldwell
“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed…. [O]ut of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.”–Booker T. Washington, African-American educator, 1901
iBiblio, “the public’s library and digital archive,” invites you to celebrate February as Black History Month. iBiblio’s annual commemoration of this event features several online collections that celebrate great African-American and African artists, institutions, and projects, with new material added this year.
There are two new organizations featured on the iBiblio front page for this year’s observance:
Questions about these featured collections can be directed to Paul Jones at pjones@metalab.unc.edu or 932-7825.
Enjoy Black History Month at iBiblio.–LJB with major contributions from Paul Jones, ibiblio
The classroom is the best setting in which to test instructional applications designed for in-class use. However, class time is precious, and only the most technophilic instructors will want to spend it beta testing untried software, especially in a wireless environment. While more and more classrooms on campus have wireless access points, it is not clear whether there is enough bandwidth available to support synchronous online activities among individual students in an average-sized class. What to do, what to do?
To begin addressing these issues, the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) of ITS-Teaching and Learning held its first “testing mob” session on January 7 in a 40-seat wireless classroom in Gardner Hall. Twenty-four volunteers, from ITS and other departments across campus, met to test Software Secure’s Securexam Browser product (http://www.softwaresecure.com/browser.htm). CIT’s Suzanne Cadwell guided the group through downloading and installing the client application and then using it to take a test on Blackboard. ITS-Telecommunications’ Todd Lane monitored network traffic and stood by to activate additional wireless access points. Thanks to the additional laptops on loan from ITS-Academic Computing and a few ambidextrous participants, 31 concurrent sessions put the software through its paces. Testers uncovered one potential security weakness, and CIT has notified the vendor of this problem.
CIT encourages you to check your inbox for future testing events and join “The Mob.”
Contributed by Suzanne Cadwell, ITS-Center for Instructional Technology
The PowerPoint slides from Dan Reed’s summary speech at the Scholarly Communications in a Digital World Convocation are available at http://www.unc.edu/scholcomdig/reed-slides.ppt
