Maybe it’s just me, but my EmuMail (aka Eaglemail) is working a little weird for me right now. It says I’ve got 23 unread messages in my inbox (I see none) and that I have 311 draft messages (waa???) Anyone else getting anything odd like that?
As far as I can tell the email still works; it’s just a little schizo.
Nope, mine seems to be working fine. Gives the right (or at least reasonable) numbers for #unread and #drafts.
Situation normal here.
Hmmm…. I guess a call to the tech folks is on my to do list….
My email is OK, but how about dept. phone lines? My Hoyt number has been without dial tone all day. Just in time to block all the students who were to call me there today.
Might have to do with your mail forwarding. My mail is just fine and I don’t forward. I suspect the others without problems don’t either.
Gee, trouble in Hoyt Hovel. “I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find that gambling is going on in here.”
It might have to do with using more of Apple’s mail program too.
As for the phones in Hoyt: I think that’s a lost cause. I’ve created a Google Voice account and am putting that down on my syllabi. It has some advantages over a “real” phone, frankly, so it’s not that bad of a compromise.
YOur comment on the lost causes of Hoyt makes sense, Sitedad, yet I persist in thinking I shouldn’t be in charge of creating the infrastructure by which my students can reach me. The early 20th century technology of telephones work pretty well for me, except on all the many times that EMU has screwed it up for my office since the move to Hoyt.
I’m using Apple’s mail program too (duh!). No problems.
Remember that Google has recently revealed itself to be just another Sith Lord of Unrepentant Capitalism. I would look for problems where Eevil lurks…like mail forwarding.
One might also consider wetware issues, or perhaps the (phonetic) Eye-dee-ten-tee error.
The phone in my Hoyt office plays a Spanish TV station. Kind of fun if you know Spanish (which I don’t).
About telephones in Hoyt – a number of ones in my dept. have been out. We’re told that on Tuesday the company will look into it.
Sadly, my phone is silent, won’t even play Spanish TV! I think your dept. is being charged extra for that service, Cheryl.
Well, I’ll say this: I have a colleague/friend at Michigan State and I believe he told me that they got rid of the office phones there. Faculty were at first outraged, but then when they found out that doing so saved the department a crazy amount of money– like $30K a year– they decided it wasn’t such a bad idea at all.
So for me, if they don’t turn my phone on in Hoyt, that is totally okay. I do 90% of my school business with students, colleagues, and people beyond EMU via email, and I would do it all over email if people would stop calling me. And so far, I like the google voice set-up a lot. I can chose to have it ring my cell (or not), it will send me an email or a text when I get a message, it transcribes those messages so I can read them instead of listening, and, if I set it up right for users, I can even email them back.
When a student wants to reach me by phone, she usually has a pretty compelling reason not to use email — such as not being connected to the ‘net at home, or having a complex matter that, by email, would take days and dozens of emails to resolve, versus a productive 25 minute phone conversation.
On Thursday, I spent the day in Hoyt, preparing for the term, and arranged for a bunch of students to call me. None could – my phone line was disconnected, unbeknown to me. PReviously, this term students who came to see me in the middle of a week day found themselves unable to enter Hoyt, as all the doors were LOCKED (unbeknown to me). This kind of thing has happen many times since the move to Hoyt; it’s likely to happen more in the fall, when the building is more used. These locked out students tried to call me – but no working office phone. (Education First! Oh – are students part of that equation? Is communication between students and faculty members relevant to university goals and priorities? Yes, on a rhetorical level; not on the practical level of university telecommunications decisions. )
And while I’m aware of the outrageous sums that universities charge departments for maintaining phone lines (and parking too), isn’t it better to address those things by POLICY decisions openly proposed and acted on, Steve, rather than by piece by piece cuts in service and the gradual abdication by various offices of providing the customary infrastructure for educators? If EMU decided that current phone lines are too expensive, and should be replaced by university provided smart phones, at a cheaper cost (as some places have done, with reportedly impressive results), well then, that’d be OK with me. But the status quo of ever declining services with no open discussion of POLICY options or viable costs, or the value, educationally, of various communication means, is nothing but EMU bureaucracy at its worst: expensive, slow, unresponsive, and dominated by decision makers far removed from the consequences of their decisions Dozens and dozens of people relocated to Hoyt have had markedly decreased services (by phone and mail, and climate control, to name just a few, yet management officials brag about how “seamless” and efficient the relocation has been. In truth they can’t even manage to get proper phone numbers listed on their online directory of relocated offices…..when failures and disasters and chaos gets counted as “success”, there is a huge structural problem in the management of the organization. This still, sadly, describes the EMU reality.
Sorry to rant, but I do get annoyed by the many needless disruptions of education that EMU imposes on students and instructors. Better to get annoyed and to rant than to get bitter and burned out.
Well, I’ll probably be posting about the whole relocating/Hoyt stuff in the next day or so, and I’ll be curious to see how Hoyt and other “during construction” measures work out once folks are on campus.
But as to talking with students on the phone: I almost never do this. If it’s one of those things that can’t really be done over email, I meet with students in person. With my online students, I either meet them in person or talk with them via something like Skype. Rarely on the phone, and I rarely have students in a situation where they have a phone but not email access.
Though, I’m not much of a phone talker in general.
And remember, the thing about Google Voice is that it does ring a phone (if you want it to), it will forward to phones, and/or it will record a voicemail. And when it records a voicemail, it sends you an email and/or text message, which means that you can call someone back. If that makes sense.
BTW, I suspect when all the dust with Pray-Harrold settles (literally!) we will have some sort of Voice Over Internet Protocol phone system that will look a lot more like Google Voice than the current voice mail system….
Following the move to Hoyt, I am all the more fond of Google Voice as a solution to the telephone dilemma. I can selectively route calls to my cell phone, and although it is a cell phone I pay for myself (perhaps a justifiable deduction now, too), it allows me to filter phone calls rather easily.
The best feature for my money (oh, alright…it’s a free service) is that Google Voice offers transcription of voice messages. When a student leaves a voice mail message, a transcribed copy of that message arrives by email within a minute, and the email includes a play button that allows me to listen to the voice message on those rare occasions when the transcript is illegible.
Now, I realize that Google is no panacea, but it is one alternative for folks who are frustrated with the Hoyt phone situation. In suggesting this, I certainly don’t mean to imply that concerns expressed by Mark and others are solved because we have temporary, inexpensive workarounds like Google Voice. Rather I wanted to mention it because, in my experience, it has greatly relieved some of the duress that comes with inconsistent communications systems.
I haven’t used my phone at all since moving to Hoyt (that silly Spanish tv station), and frankly haven’t missed it. Instead, like many of us, I use email which is more convenient for students and for me. Like Sitedad, I meet with students regularly face to face to answer questions and share information. I too hate talking on the phone. I do like that Skype idea, though, since I Skype with my daughter at Michigan State regularly. It’s fun.
Today, my phone in Hoyt is working, at last, but my office email connection is down.
Yes, the EMU email system is down and has been for an hour or so; but there’s been no effort to inform the EMU community of this fact. Instead, the option has been chosen to allow hundreds or thousands of people to each individually spend endless time trying to get on. A notice on the University website would be effective and save a lot of people a lot of time. Has anyone been down this same road before?
Of course, it’s hard to let people know if the email system is down. I mean, send an email, and….
Actually, many things internet related seem to be kind of wonky here at the start of the term.
Yes, sitedad, email doesn’t work to say that email is down….but a large organization’s web site is a very effective and often used means of conveying that kind of news to large numbers of people. Indeed, I believe it’s standard practice at lots of campuses and large organization. Simple and easy, but putting such a notice on the EMU website, which could have informed hundreds of thousands of people of the nature of the problem (and that it wasn’t local to their machine, connections or building), would require a DECISION by two separate divisions that conveying timely information to the EMU community is better than….leaving everyone in the dark.