Ethnography Week #3

Ethnography Week #3

During the past week we began our onsite observation and interaction with technicians. We spent a total of 4 to 5 hours onsite observing and socializing with technicians. While some details must be withheld for privacy concerns, the events of our onsite visits were very colorful and intriguing.

Technicians are housed in a small room on the second floor of a building on campus. The room is largely a storage area for equipment and tools, with some workspace areas. Most of the techs bring their personal laptops to work with them, but a few use one of the provided computers. The most striking aspect of the room is the amount of tools which are kept on hand. When thinking of technical support, one rarely imagines the need for so many heavy duty tools. The presence of the tools is probably attributable to the demanding nature of installing classroom equipment.

We were present at both morning and afternoon shifts, on separate days. The morning shift had fewer people, which were somewhat suspicious or curious about our project and requirement of being there. We have elected to only tell technicians that we are present to observe their tech support calls, as we are studying professors interacting with technology. This allows us to be included into the culture without any obvious deviations in technicians behavior due to our presence.

Techs took little time to warm up to us and went on about their jobs in what seemed to be a normal manner. Much time is spent passing time, filled with visiting popular websites, working on class assignments, eating or chatting with others. During our morning shift observation we attended two tech calls during the time between class change.

The first issue, details redacted, was minor and essentially a non-issue reported as a problem. The professor involved was friendly and curious to tech staff and offered ample support for them to perform their jobs. The second issue involved a total system failure and while the professor was somewhat (legitimately) annoyed by the situation, the professor remained polite and calm while staff fixed the issue.

On the side of analysis it seems that technicians are mainly active during class change periods with very limited time to settle issues. Additionally, it seems that they spend most of their time passing time. There is a sense of ownership of the equipment and responsibility for the systems among employees. Professors have been generally kind and understanding during interactions, though we question if our presence may be causing this (as it creates many people responding to a tech call, rather than a single tech-- sometimes up to 5 or 6 including us).

Overall, we have gained a great deal of insight and more importantly acceptance into the world of help desk technicians and the users they support. We plan to continue our study with this focus, and a continued minor focus on pure classroom observation.