When George Washington inaugurated the presidency in 1789, the second article of the Constitution that provided for the powers of his new office gave him a broad palette with which to work in carving out the responsibilities of his position.

Peter Coclanis has to feel a little like the first president, deciding what exactly he will do with the new post of associate provost for international affairs. While there may not be a precedent, he knows he must do a little bit of everything to enhance the University's status as an international presence - part ambassador, part scholar and part fund-raiser. The job description calls for "an ambassador, a spokesperson, an advocate for international interests, and a facilitator for international activities."

"We have so many strong international programs at the University, but most are working within their own department and school," said Coclanis, who is the Albert R. Newsome Professor of history and former chair of the department. "We're now trying to render them more visible and leverage their power by pairing them together."

"The international studies programs at most universities are separate from local concerns," said James Peacock, Kenan Professor of anthropology and director of the University's Center for International Studies. "Linking them [international studies] to issues at home is something different than most schools do, because they usually focus exclusively abroad."

Coclanis has worked at UNC since 1984. While conducting research on globalization over the years, he has collaborated with scholars in China, Germany, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Coclanis also directed UNC's inaugural Asian Immersion Program.

While the University emphasizes its connection to the state and its reputation as "the University of the people," Coclanis plans to draw on his own research background in connecting his new work to North Carolina.

"There's no bigger issue than the way the international economy is impacting the state's economy," said Coclanis, who has served as chair of the faculty advisory board for the Center for the Study of the American South. "It's impossible to stop our analysis of this at the state line."

A well-traveled scholar, Coclanis' work has taken him from the fields and rice paddies of Vietnam and Thailand to China, where he collaborated with the minister of agriculture. Coclanis also studied in the libraries and historical archives of Burma, where he

was among the first Americans to gain access to the government's archives.

"Studying internationally has humbled me. It has transformed my scholarly trajectory and expanded my thinking by causing me to look at things differently, both in my view of my country and my research.

"In the coming years, the most dynamic places are going to be those that are most open. We want our University to be a magnet, attracting the best people and ideas.

"In rendering this international role more high profile, by no means are we abdicating our role of service to the state. We can better serve the people of the state by understanding these global perspectives and becoming more effective and efficient."

Coclanis cited the increased immigration presence in the state, the loss of jobs abroad, foreign capital investment from overseas companies in North Carolina, and the globalization of world and local markets as issues he will attempt to take on. He argues that as the world becomes increasingly integrated, the University must contribute to solving international problems.

"Even helping promote political democratization in Thailand can have an impact on North Carolina by helping the nation develop a better market for our goods. You would be hard-pressed to find anything UNC is doing now that doesn't impact the state in some way."

With this enhanced commitment to international issues, the University plans to break ground in 2006 for a building to house international affairs. The facility, to be between The Carolina Inn and the School of Public Health, will provide classrooms, performance halls, a cafe, centers where students can obtain information on traveling abroad and housing for foreign visitors.

Besides his duties on campus, Coclanis will be responsible for reaching out to alumni throughout the world, seeking their input on the University's international role. He also will lobby the N.C. General Assembly and higher education constituencies in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the University's international endeavors.

Coclanis wants to see more students travel abroad, and he is interested in broadening UNC's offerings of foreign languages.

"You can't be a significant player unless you have a global vision, and you can't have a global reach unless you define problems and solutions using global means," he said. "The quicker we acknowledge this and act on this, the better."

For Freshmen with Cameras, All the State's a Classroom

Todd Taylor had an idea that, if you put a camera in a freshman's hands, we all might glimpse something new.

The associate professor of English did just that by creating a first-year seminar titled "Multimedia North Carolina," allowing freshmen to create documentaries based on their work for local community-service programs and how the issues they encounter there relate to North Carolina.

The heart of the class, Taylor said, is for students to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for the state in addition to improving their writing and research skills in a real-world environment.

"My main goal for this class is actually to help students improve their writing, which I find much easier to do when students are deeply engaged in their subject," Taylor said. "After a semester working intimately at a local service agency, it becomes very important to students to represent the experience with their best possible effort."

As a part of the course, Taylor's students also take a three-day bus tour of the state to understand how the issues they cover in their documentaries affect North Carolina residents. The "Tar Heel Undergraduate Bus Tour" gives Taylor's 19 freshmen a crash course in the state's culture by taking them everywhere from a folk art center on the Blue Ridge Parkway to a tobacco farm in Franklin County.

Taylor's inspiration came from his participation in the weeklong Tar Heel Bus Tour for new faculty in the summer of 1998.

"Expanding the perspective of a course beyond the walls of our Greenlaw classroom to encompass a large part of the state seemed like the best kind of education I could imagine," he said.

Taylor discovered that many freshmen rarely leave campus. The bus tour provided an unusual opportunity to broaden their horizons by getting to know the state as well as their classmates.

"There's nothing like being on a bus together for three days to get to know someone," Taylor said. He worked in frequent study sessions on the bus and at designated rest stops during the November weekend trip.

Another of Taylor's classes, titled "Documentary North Carolina," went along on the trip. Students in this class are creating documentaries for the Orange County government based on three historic farm sites the county recently acquired.

Before giving them cameras, Taylor tries to get his students to understand the real meaning and purpose of documentaries by viewing and studying a variety of film and literary examples. The first assignment is to create a biography of a classmate based on interviews. This introduces students to the ethical and creative difficulties inherent in making documentaries.

"Study of the documentary genre is especially accessible and important at the moment, given the current popularity of so-called reality-based media," Taylor said. "Students learn to appreciate just how wide the documentary spectrum can be -- some are exposes, some are basic history, some are propaganda, some are entertainment, and once students get a sense of the range of what's possible within documentary work, I ask them to compose projects that enable their subjects to tell their own stories in their own words."

"Multimedia North Carolina" is a first-year seminar, designed by the University to put freshmen in a smaller class with a distinguished faculty member. First-year seminar courses engage class discussion and improve student communication skills through professors who employ creative teaching strategies. Taylor funded the tour through a variety of private sources, including a UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities fellowship, a grant from APPLES (Assisting People in Planning Learning Experiences in Service), the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence and the English department.

Taylor's class is also a part of the APPLES student-organized service learning curriculum; students are required to complete three to five hours of community service a week instead of traditional study assignments.

"The students are serving the state and the community to see these problems like homelessness and poverty first-hand rather than reading about it in the newspaper," Taylor said. "It's a comprehensive sense of serving the people in the state and getting involved themselves, so it's about as ideal a situation as you can create."

Some studied literacy rates in schools. One project chronicled a local thrift store that raises funds for a community center for people with mental illness. One student completed a documentary on the Greensboro YWCA's Teen Parent Mentor Program that so impressed program officials they decided to use it in their own campaigns to raise awareness about issues facing teen mothers.

After hours spent meticulously editing their work, the students present their footage to the public. The documentaries will be showcased this spring at a multimedia festival hosted by the Johnston Center, where film shot by UNC students is viewed. Last spring was the inaugural multimedia festival.

Anna Wheeler interned with and created a documentary on a Carrboro-based treatment and education program for children with autism and related handicaps. When the bus tour made a stop in Rutherfordton, Wheeler's hometown, her mother met the class with freshly baked pies.

"This class was so much more than a class," Wheeler said. "I could never have imagined that during my first semester at college, my professor, well-distinguished and respected in the English department at Carolina, along with 19 of my classmates would be in my home county, eating pecan pie that my mom had made."

Alex Freeman, who completed a documentary on the "Club Nova" thrift store that raises money for the community center for the mentally ill, said Taylor's class changed his life.

"I learned just how enriching a good education can be," Freeman said. "I found a community within my volunteering agency. I made friends with 18 other incredible, talented and inspiring classmates. I went on a tour of North Carolina, a state that I previously knew little about."

Taylor believes that the lasting bonds made through a class such as this one help define what a student's college experience should be.

"The University in general is such a rich resource for this. These students are doing real research, and half of them are still volunteering with their subjects because they made such a connection with them. We definitely think of the state as our ultimate workshop."

Sports Ethics Under the Student Microscope

Given the state of college athletics today, many would say a study of ethics in the field would find it severely lacking. Scandals have rocked the news, with tales of illegal financial handouts, academic fraud and even murder.

While UNC has long prided itself on holding its athletics programs to a higher standard, it also feels the increasingly high stakes of new-world economics and the pressure to win.

Ethical issues and their inherent dilemmas have always fascinated Professor John Sweeney '86 (MED). That, along with an interest in sports, inspired him to create "Ethical Issues in Sports Communication," a class offered as a part of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication's new sports communication certificate program.

Sweeney, who came to Carolina with an extensive professional background in advertising, said the study of sports provides an unusual opportunity to discuss many issues facing society.

"Sports is a staging ground, because it doesn't create issues, but it stages them and provides an area where everyone can relate," he said. "In our society, there are few areas where the CEO and the janitor can have an equal base of knowledge, but sports is one of them."

Drawing from his work in advertising, Sweeney found parallels between uninformed critiques of his work and the countless television and radio sports call-in shows where listeners go on-air to passionately rant about topics on which they are uneducated.

"We need to understand events a little better and study them before ranting on them, instead of just giving off emotion. If you're in a position to give a credible opinion on a subject, I hope you're informed enough to shed insight on it."

The sports ethics class is one of the three classes Sweeney is responsible for teaching in the new program. Last fall, he also taught a class in sports marketing and advertising, and he is teaching sports communication this spring.

Last summer, the University approved the journalism school's request to recognize the sports communication certificate program, making it the first undergraduate professional certificate approved at UNC. The program officially begins this spring and is the first in the country to integrate sports with principles of marketing, advertising and ethics.

The sports communication program was established with a $1 million anonymous grant to the journalism school in 2002. The money will endow a professorship and provide operating funds.

As part of the class, students were assigned to write a research paper on a topic facing collegiate athletics, ranging from diversity issues, the commercialization of the Olympics, tobacco and alcohol sponsorship of sports, Title IX and women in sports to competitive pressures among athletes to win at all costs.

The class also spearheaded a public panel discussion in October on the future of college football with college sports experts. Panelists participating in the discussion included UNC System President Emeritus William Friday '48 (LLB), who has chaired the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics; and Athletics Director Dick Baddour '66. The class issued a report in November based on its findings.

"It went 200 percent better than I thought it would," said Wes Wilson, a junior from Mount Airy. "I think we were all kind of cynical going in about the responses we would get and that the panelists might dodge our questions, but they were very helpful, and it was fun watching the back-and-forth exchange."

Sweeney also has had Stuart Scott '87, an anchor on ESPN, and John Walsh, senior vice president and executive editor of ESPN, among others, visit his classes.

"We're learning from some of the best and most knowledgeable people in the business," Wilson said. "The most interesting thing about the classes has been all of the different voices that have come in and talked to us.

"I've gotten a lot out of getting to rack the brains of these big-time players in the sports world."

This spring, Sweeney's students are working with the NBA's Miami Heat to develop a marketing plan to reach out to college students in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale area.

Kim Stone '90, chief of staff and vice president of business development for the Heat, said working with Sweeney's class is a win-win situation.

"The students are doing good work we can use in marketing, and they're getting valuable lessons and real world experience they can use," Stone said. "If we're able to take the students' ideas and implement them, it's something they can put on their resumes." She said despite the abundance of college populations in the South Beach area, her UNC ties drew her back.

Freida Huggins, a junior from Wilson, said, "The issues that Professor Sweeney has presented to the class are totally new to me, and therefore I don't have a lot of previous opinions on the subjects. I have learned a great deal about sports in general and now have a working knowledge of a subject that was vague to me before."

Sweeney said he studies news through an analytical lens, looking for ways to explain the context of events on a larger scale. He cited the 1991 announcement by Magic Johnson that he had contracted HIV as a turning point in the way society viewed the disease.

"It was because he was a famous basketball player," Sweeney said. "This staged it in ways that would not have been possible had it not been for sports."

Another significant topic in his classes is the ubiquitous nature of contemporary media.

"In this age of 24/7 sports news channels, is it appropriate to pander to people's salacious desires for stories such as the Kobe Bryant case when they're building up advertising revenue?"

Sweeney isn't a sports nut, and he has found a scholarly approach to this topic to be particularly invigorating. "I have to go into areas I don't know a lot about. And unlike a lot of fields of study, students know a lot about this topic and will let you know when you don't.

"It's the independence that I'm looking for from students," he said. "Which doesn't necessarily mean they always agree with me, I've found."

The Lay of the Land, Through Different Senses

The ivory columns and statuesque presence of the Old Well. The pastoral beauty of dogwoods blooming in spring. The bustle of the crowded Pit on a busy day. All are qualities of a picturesque campus that many at Carolina take for granted. But what of those who can't enjoy the visual elegance that so defines the southern part of heaven?

Vision-impaired students at Carolina have found an ally in Gary Bishop '84 (PhD), an associate professor of computer science. He's working on maps that the user can hear and feel.

Bishop has been instrumental in the development of BATS (Blind Audio Tactile Mapping System) technology, a program that serves as a spatial-data exploration tool for the visually impaired.

The user handles a mouse, trackball or tablet input device to position a pointer over a map. The directional keys on the numeric keypad also help the user navigate. When passing over the familiar features of a map - rivers, railroads, towns and cities - the user hears sounds associated with each of those, including geographic highlights and points of interest in each place.

The sounds come through headphones stereophonically, from ear to ear, to simulate passage from one place to another.

Bishop also is developing a campus map that will help blind students learn their routes across campus. He is working with the facilities services department to enable the map to be updated automatically to include changes from new construction.

Bishop's interest in creating a map for the blind resulted from his desire to show residents of North Carolina how the University is producing practical technology that helps people.

"I think that the people of North Carolina know what N.C. State does for them, with farming and engineering especially, but I'm not so sure they know what UNC does for them," said Bishop. "This project has tremendous potential for us to positively impact the lives of both our students and the people of the state."

An interest in public service may have driven him to pursue assistive technology for the blind, but it was a chance encounter that inspired Bishop to develop BATS.

Bishop was walking across campus one day when he noticed Jason Morris, a blind graduate student led by a seeing-eye dog. While Bishop was hesitant to speak, Morris heard Bishop approaching and stopped to ask him for directions.

"We started talking, and he told me that he was a student in the classics department and that he needed access to maps of England for one of his projects," Bishop said. "He was having trouble using other tactile maps."

Bishop and five undergraduate students in the computer science department worked in collaboration with the University's Ancient World Mapping Center to create a map of ancient England derived from the Barrington Atlas. Using the BATS technology, Morris was able to use the map to write a paper describing distances between settlements and the role of the Roman government when it occupied these territories.

With the success of the BATS England prototype map, Bishop went to work on developing a map of North Carolina that will be in use in fourth-grade classrooms across the state this year. The N.C. map was created with the assistance of information obtained from the National Atlas Web site.

This map incorporates information on cities, counties, and state and national parks using distinctive sounds, such as traffic noise signaling the proximity of a city. Users also receive a mild vibration through a joystick or mouse when crossing a state or county border.

By clicking on certain places on the map, local landmarks audibly reveal their names and pertinent information about their history. Another option allows users to obtain the name, population, area and perimeter of their location.

"In the fourth grade, kids learn about North Carolina and often the lessons are based on maps," Bishop said. "We want to make it possible for kids who are blind to participate in those lessons."

Bishop said that after visiting a classroom where blind children had to sit by and wait while their peers studied maps and practiced keyboarding skills, he was amazed at how blind students were left out of everyday learning experiences. He hopes that having kids working together in the same classroom will help to bring blind students together with other children.

Bishop taught a class on assistive technology in the spring and found a surprising number of students interested in the topic.

"Of the 50 students enrolled in the class, half of them were women," he said. "I talked to other professors, and they said that having this many women in a class was a first for the computer science department."

Bishop hopes that he can continue work on the BATS technology to develop textbooks and maps that will reach larger audiences, although the state budget crisis and a struggling national economy have threatened his research.

"Microsoft has been very generous to us, they're very interested in supporting cool research," said Bishop. "But all over the nation, states are in the hole and funding is in trouble. We're kind of stuck until the economy heats up."

The BATS technology was groundbreaking for the simple reason that it is so easily accessible to users; other assistive software has been difficult to operate and slow in development.

"I still work with Jason, and he really needs this funding," said Bishop. Morris evaluates the system as programmers develop it, then tells them how to improve what doesn't work, and what aspects are impractical. "We're not developing technology in a vacuum here. We rely on the users that we create this for to help us in developing it, so we can see what really works and what doesn't."

Morris said he hopes to create an atlas of the ancient world for use in high schools. "I think that's why more blind students don't go into my area of study," he said. "If the resources aren't there and you have to create them yourself, it kind of defeats the purpose."

James Kessler, UNC's director of disabilities services, believes Bishop's work could reach a new generation of visually impaired students.

"One day, a vision-impaired student could go on the UNC Web site and know which buildings are closed and which ones are open, and also see where construction is taking place on campus," Kessler said. "I think with this technology, we could open up an entire world for maps in a public school system that blind children have never had."

Bishop touts his work as "geeks trying to make the world a bit better" and says that the classroom experience his students receive by providing solutions for real life problems is unique.

"Students spend so much time working on assignments that they turn in to a T.A. who looks at the work and then throws it away," said Bishop. "It's different for them to work on a problem [where] somebody really needs a solution. ... I'm excited and motivated about it for me, my students and the people we help."