Finding online social communities using Skype
Discovering a new way to learn languages with Skype
Finding out how to search for skypers with common interests
Taking classes using Skype
Not even Gulliver in his travels could hold bragging rights over the variety of scenes, pursuits, opportunities, and enterprises populating the new Skype landscape. Every existing endeavor, as well as every endeavor made possible by the Skype peer-to-peer technology, appears redesigned as a Skype community. The speed at which new connections are made between people of like minds and interests is astonishing. As fast as you can read this chapter is as fast as Skype communities assemble. This chapter opens the door, just a crack, to an array of social, education, commerce, and special interest communities for you to explore.
The people we meet, do business with, socialize with, and learn with are no longer limited to random acts of luck (or misfortune). We can pick communities to join, leave communities we dislike, and start our own communities if there are none out there representing our obscure passion for playing the Hawaiian nose flute. In this chapter, you find out how to take a class or join a book club using Skype, where to find a Skype partner to learn a new language, how to use Skype to kindle new friendships (and romances), and what hot new Web communities are adopting Skype at their core so that their members can start to talk to one another.
As Skype becomes a more common way to connect, more Web communities are adding it to their menu of choices. The Skype contribution, instant voice messaging, adds immense value to existing tools such as emails, discussion threads, and text messaging. Listening and speaking are, after all, our most natural way to get to know each other. You can hear someone's personality in his or her voice as much as reveal your own. No wonder Skype is becoming a mainstay of some of the most active online social settings, such as the following:
Social forums: Web-based search and communication tools designed to let you find other people with common interests for friendship, romance, conversation, or business.
Online classes: Web-based groups led by instructors involving a formal sign-up process, or small study groups organized through search tools and having no formal teacher or registration.
Virtual conferences: Web-based conferences for large groups (100 participants) led by one or more people on any topic imaginable.
Online dating is not new, but online dating with an instant, private way to speak with a potential date is a welcome addition to the experience. Skype changes the nature and experience of Web romance in some significant ways:
Talk to a prospective date: Skype voice and chat tools let people hear each other before giving out phone numbers and addresses. The biggest benefit in using Skype to socialize is that you can create a direct and immediate contact with a potential friend.
Connect using cutting edge online tools: Sites such as
www.someonenew.comfeature Skype as the primary incentive to use their portals (see Figure 13-1). Another online dating site,www.verbdate.com, advertises itself as the place "Where People Speak before They Meet." Unlike other sites built around those in the know about Skype,www.verbdate.comregistration screens include a Skype flash tutorial, an explanation of the technology, and a link towww.skype.comto download the software.Skype from within each online community: On the site
www.someonenew.com, the primary way you connect to another member is by clicking his or her Skype Name featured in an online profile. The link is active, causing Skype to open and begin a direct call to your potential new friend. If that "someone new" is online and willing to accept your call, just speak up!Take the guesswork out of calling: Making contact with a new friend, and possibly a new romantic friend, can be scary. When you call with cell phones or landlines, you have no idea whether anyone will pick up or how you will be received. Skype lets you — and your new dating partner — broadcast your availability to receive calls through online status icons, giving you a little time to build up your courage.
Connect privately and safely: You don't need to give out a phone number in order to receive, or make, a direct call. You can skype from your computer to another computer or to a regular phone without revealing any personal information. Your Skype profile shows only the information that you choose to make public. So you can really begin to know someone before trading addresses and phone numbers, and you can do so without feeling uncomfortable about keeping that information secret.
Joining a social community has never been easier than in this age of virtual societies. This section introduces a couple of communities you may want to explore.
Bebo (www.bebo.com) is a Web site whose sole purpose is to create community and connect people. Its eye-popping profile pages, filled with the latest multimedia and interactive ingredients, let members show their personalities. After you see, hear, and interact with a Bebo profile page, you probably soon know whether you have found a friend to talk to over Skype. On their profile page, Bebo users can
Share playlists: Bebo users can post favorite music clips on profile pages. These clips open in a colorful MP3 player, and you can listen to them on the spot. Click a link to automatically copy the playlist to your own Bebo profile if you like the selection.
Post a gallery of friends: A section of your Bebo profile page displays Bebo friends you've added. Rather than a barebones text buddy list, you see all the photos your online friends uploaded to their own Bebo home page. Each photo has a link to each individual. You can easily begin to develop a large circle of friends with common interests. We searched for Bebo users who play the fiddle and use Skype. Bebo returned a long list, and each of those skyping fiddlers had galleries of friends. The potential for building a vibrant, personal community is built into the Bebo profile interface.
Grow a fan base for your favorite band: Another section of the personal profile page is devoted to posting pictures of musical groups. Each picture is linked to a separate Bebo Band page listing information about the band, comments about the band members, tour dates, songs, albums, a gallery of fans, and the band's home page.
Show a movie: Bebo allows you to upload a short movie clip onto your Bebo home page. Many Bebo movies are homemade; some are commercial clips. You can also click the Add To My Homepage link to put a Bebo movie you like onto your own profile page. Bebo's interactivity is all about sharing.
Draw a reply to a whiteboard message: Bebo has a section on each profile page for drawing or writing on a blank whiteboard. It's an unusual area because each whiteboard drawing becomes a posted message to which other Bebo users can respond. In place of traditional conversation threads, whiteboards supply colorful, imaginative image threads. Mostly they are just another way to have fun at this online party.
Create a quiz: Bebo has a quiz wizard for instant, original, and personal quizzes. These quizzes are often used to see how much your friends know about you.
Poll your friends: Bebo also has a poll wizard to help you create multiple-choice questions. As people respond to the poll by selecting an answer, the results of the poll appear. Poll takers know immediately how much in or out of sync they are with your personal community.
Upload multiple photo albums: Many online communities let you post a picture, but Bebo lets you post scores of images. Each album on a Bebo profile page is represented by a thumbnail photo linked to a larger album.
Create a blog: Bebo has a section for ongoing online diaries called blogs (short for web logs) with links to the blogger's profile as well as a link to reply directly to the blogger.
To integrate Skype into its Web community, Bebo adds a field in the registration page for a Skype Name when you join. If you want to contact someone on Bebo, you can email, post comments, or skype directly from each profile page. Skype status icons are posted alongside on the Bebo user's profile page, so you know who is online and available to talk (see Figure 13-2). Of course, if your new friend decides not to authorize you to make this Skype connection, you'll just have to keep looking for another willing Bebo companion.
The Skype Journal (www.skypejournal.com) is a community "newspaper" with a difference. The community this resource attracts (namely, skypers) has a direct pipeline to the journalists who write for the publication. Each writer has a byline with a Skype status icon next to his or her name. In fact, writers' names are direct links to a Web page with clickable icons for Skype calls, text messaging, Skype Voicemail, and even an old-fashioned phone number (suitable for a SkypeOut call).
The Skype Journal posts formal articles on all things Skype. Topics include gadgets, Web sites, software, controversies, anecdotes, and interviews. Each article is filled with hyperlinks (clickable connections to more information), a Listen to This Article link to a spoken version (as a QuickTime movie), and a TrackBack link that connects to previously published articles on a similar topic. In addition, every article has an Add Your Comments link for instant feedback on the article or comments on the topic. The Skype Journal archives the latest 200 posted reactions, which are accessible on any page of its Web site by clicking the "Skype Journal comment river." Wading through the "comment river" yields links to blogs, Web sites, and Skype Names and provides a handy link back to the referenced article.
Whereas the Skype Journal is a topical gathering place, the Skype Forum (forum.skype.com/) consists of a lively collection of discussion threads hosted by Skype itself. The Skype Forum publishes comments, questions, and stories related to personal, professional, imaginative, sentimental, economic, and technical issues. Everyone who signs into the Skype Forum can add a Skype Name (as well as an AOL, Yahoo!, or MSN username) to a profile, so it's possible to make direct contact with a kindred spirit around a hot Skype topic.
Learning online, within a vibrant multilanguage, multi-age, and multicultural community that crosses time zones, political affiliations and geography, forces a change in educational habits. Joining a learning community means that the students have to "construct" their own learning by participating in live video debates, posting PowerPoint resources, contributing to threaded discussions, and honing written language skills by chatting with other students who may be speaking other languages. A new way of learning is emerging, shaped by the need for online learning collaboration and demanding written, spoken, visual, synchronous, and asynchronous participation by both teachers and students as a group and as individuals.
The addition of Skype to online learning has opened a powerful, live, face-to-face, and chat-to-chat arena with the following advantages:
Authentic conversations: When you can learn a language by connecting to a native speaker, chances are you won't want to return to memorizing dialogues from books. The same applies to a conversation with an author or an expert in your field of study. The opportunity to meet, interview, and respond by including Skype in an online course connects the facts to real people in a very compelling, personal way.
Nontraditional feedback: Traditional feedback, such as tests, grades, and marked papers often define how students learn in a classroom. Students study, take a test, and then wait for feedback in the form of a grade. New kinds of feedback experiences in forums, chat rooms, and live conferences provide an immediate response to students. Students not only react to ideas but also demand reactions from others, and they don't have to wait until the end of the term to figure out whether they've learned anything.
Unexpected collaboration: School is sometimes a lonely, solitary pursuit. Students spend endless hours on the Internet doing research, reading texts, and completing homework. Online classes can exaggerate that isolation. Adding Skype conferencing, video connections, file transfer, and chats invites collaboration and academic give-and-take because Skype, by design, is a social place.
Many people take neighborhood continuing-education classes to meet kindred spirits. Now that our neighborhoods are online and have virtually no boundaries, no one has to settle for a class in word processing when Conversational Spanish would be preferable. In a brick–and-mortar school, the menu of classes is often limited. In a virtual school, the offerings can be almost endless. One of the most active online learning communities to fully integrate Skype is called Moodle, found at www.moodle.org. Moodle is a free, online course-creation software that provides quiz construction, grading, surveys, open forums, threaded discussion, and wikis (which are online references created, edited, and updated by the Web community). Anyone can download Moodle, host it on a server, load it with curricular materials, and run an online school. (For the curious, the word moodle derives from the acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is useful mostly to programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them — an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity.)
On Moodle, you can register and enroll in online courses. During registration, Moodle users can add their Skype Name to their profile, along with a list of various methods of communicating (see Figure 13-3). A dynamic combination of learner-initiated activities guarantees that nobody will fall asleep in the back of the virtual room. Take a quiz; give a quiz. Answer a poll; create your own survey. Make a movie and post it in Moodle class resources. When the mediator/teacher asks a question, Moodle users can now skype their answers through file transfer, or just speak up in class, if the instructor chooses to conduct class with Skype as the central communication tool.
It's no surprise that Moodle has embraced Skype technology in its arsenal of learning tools. With Skype, a Moodle course enables students to
Connect to similar classes across the globe and share ideas in a real-time mini-conference.
Confer with the lecturer directly rather than through email or threaded discussions. You don't have to wait for a response when you can simply engage in a conversation.
Share work on the fly through file transfer. Skype is ideal for educational collaboration.
Form study groups "after class" by skyping your classmates.
Language isolates communities from one another; studying languages connects them. The excitement of speaking another language goes a long way toward bringing extremely diverse cultures together. Probably the most natural use of Skype in education is to link students of foreign languages. After all, the best way to acquire a language is to speak it. The best way to speak a foreign language is with a native speaker, and Skype lets you speak with anyone around the world. As Skype technology takes hold, more and more language learning sites are emerging around the ease of using Voice over Internet Telephony, or VoIP. You can use Skype to acquire a new language on the following Web sites:
Dickinson College created this site at www.language-exchanges.org as a free language exchange site. The Mixxer provides a search tool for finding language partners who use Skype. To join The Mixxer, register with an email address (which serves as your login name) and a password. Fill out a profile screen with your Skype Name, time zone, your native language, and the language you want to study. Your picture, age, and interests are optional information.
Note
To let your Mixxer language partners know when you are available on Skype, you have to change your Skype privacy settings. To do so in Windows, follow these steps:
Choose Start
All Programs
Skype to launch Skype.Choose Tools
OptionsPrivacy and then select Allow My Status to Be Shown on the Web.
To change your privacy settings on the Macintosh, follow these steps:
Click the Skype icon in your dock to launch Skype.
Choose Skype
PreferencesPrivacy and select Allow My Status to Be Shown on the Web.
On Mixxer, you can explore the site and search for possible language partners Mixxer finds. For each prospective partner, Mixxer posts a name, a Skype Name, language, location, and local time. Mixxer also provides links to a user's Skype Profile and text chats, and posts Skype presence icons so that you know when someone you want to contact is online.
xLingo (www.xlingo.com) is another free site promoting language exchange using a host of online tools including Skype. After joining xLingo using a standard sign-up screen to enter a username, email address, password, location, and language preference, you find numerous options for picking up a new language. Among them is to search for and connect to language partners through Skype. You don't need to search for any Skype contact information; instead, select a partner from the search list and click the name to pull up an xLingo profile. Each profile connects directly to Skype.
My Language Exchange (www.mylanguageexchange.com) is free, allows a partner search, and recommends using Skype to take advantage of its resources, although Skype is not integrated directly into the online software. My Language Exchange is a formal language-learning site with very specific methods. It promotes the Cormier method of language exchange, developed at the Club d'échange linguistique de Montréal (C.E.L.M. language school) in combination with Skype audio conferencing. With the Cormier method, you do the following:
Form small groups: Gather no more than four people so that everyone gets a chance to speak. The ideal group contains equal numbers of speakers of each language (two English and two French, for example).
Find conversation partners who understand 40 percent to 70 percent of a conversation: This is harder with a larger group but perfect for a Skype conference.
Speak one language half the time and then switch and speak the second language half the time.
Use a timer to keep the group rotating languages: Every Skype call window has a built-in timer, perfect for keeping the language flow.
Skype is incorporated in this method by providing a simple, immediate, global way to speak online. In addition, you can use the Skype chat window to do the following: clarify new words and terms; use the Skype file transfer tool to share lesson plans (available on the My Language.com Web site); and use the Skype online status icon to let your study buddies know when you are online and ready to start class.
There may be thousands of people intrigued by the same hobbies you are, passionate about the same causes you embrace, or fascinated by the same collectibles you cherish. The Internet has a long history of bulletin boards, newsgroups, and so on, but Skype enables these communities, both large and small, to connect in a new way, invigorating and empowering each interest group with tools formerly too complicated or too expensive to implement.
Any interest group, club, or society can benefit from spreading Skype around, plugging in those microphones and talking to each other on a regular basis. Here are some types of groups already skyping away happily:
People with disabilities: Individuals with mobility problems can join a group over Skype. For people with limited mobility, an online visit eliminates the difficulty of finding transportation, calling a paratransit bus, or getting into an adapted vehicle. Skype software can also be installed on computers with touch screens and special switches to enable alternative mouse access for individuals with limited physical movement.
People who communicate in sign language: Individuals with hearing challenges can use the Skype chat window and file transfer as well as videoconferencing to communicate in sign language.
Musicians: Musicians are beginning to experiment with Skype as a tool for remote jamming, collaborative composing, and performing.
Collectors: All collectibles — stamps, shells, vintage toys —are a rallying point for a Skype group. Collectors love to talk, trade, and just bond with other collectors. Collectors can transfer Contact lists through Skype to share with fellow enthusiasts. You can even enjoy an active group if you live in a small town that is unlikely to have another passionate rock tumbler living in the neighborhood.
Gamers: Gamers are used to online communities, which tend to be imaginary realms with richly costumed avatars. Some players are combining gaming with Skype, so you can converse with your opponent, discussing strategy and making a few friends outside the virtual arena.
Family Communities: Families are reconnecting over the Web. Grandparents receive digital photo albums and email greetings, and they can view elaborate Web sites created for newborns. Most of this happens asynchronously, that is, not everyone is in the same virtual room at the same time. Skype can change that. With an easy conference call, Susan can conference in Mom and Dad in Florida, her sister in Flemington, and her brother in Newburgh. Everyone can talk, enter comments in the chat window, and turn on those video cameras for a real family gathering.
People always bond together to help others in need. Charities, victim services, outreach, and disaster relief all find representation on blogs and Web sites in addition to physical gatherings. Three key questions that organizations that ask are, How quickly can we help, How efficiently can we plan joint efforts, and Do we have the funds to get things done? Skype technology goes a long way toward helping in these areas in the following ways:
Cost savings: Skype enables a significant reduction in long-distance telephone costs. If you skype through your computer, no cost is associated with that call.
Time savings: Another great expense for relief organizations is time spent on personnel and travel. Eliminating even some air, rail, or rental car costs puts more in the coffers for those in need.
Planning and organizing that save lives: One organization devoted to building shelters and housing for refuge and disaster victims has posted a Web-based Skype Me button for instant access to the central office. Of course, bringing all the members of a group into a common environment for Skype collaboration takes time, but after it is established, an enormous amount of coordination can take place in record time. With voice, chat, and file transfer available, many of the elements of a dynamic, timely, successful relief effort are in place. Planning is spent on how to help, not how to get to a meeting in order to talk about how to help.