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Skype-ing work
By Ben Williamson, Learning Researcher, Futurelab |
Imagine being able to make free international telephone calls. Now imagine that the sound quality of your calls is better than you can get through either your mobile phone or landline, and that you are able to tell when your friends are available to chat, or let people know when you are available.
Imagine you can use the service to track down potential contacts and expand your social networks, and send them text data and website locations while still talking. Now visit the Skype.com website and try it out for free.
Skype is a new peer-to-peer (p2p) internet service, from the developers of the Kazaa file-sharing service, that provides free internet telephony with these features. Currently in beta testing, it is already being used by over 1.5 million people after just six weeks online, with some speculating that it could become the big 'killer app' for broadband.
Although internet telephony, or Voice-over IP (VoIP), has existed for some time, Skype is the first to offer unlimited free calls between users - wherever they are in the world. This opens up some interesting opportunities for small businesses, but perhaps even more so for schools and colleges wishing to embark on foreign languages and cross-cultural projects.
Like Kazaa, Skype's founders describe it as 'disruptive technology'. But for many small organisations file-sharing services such as p2p actually enable rather than disrupt what they can achieve, because they allow users to cheaply, and often freely, locate content directly from the individual who wishes to share it, and to download it from there without a central point of management.
It just so happens that most of the content that gets shared through these services is under copyright, and its distribution over the web (like pirating CDs) is illegal - although the Kazaa website encourages musicians, producers, photographers, poets and artists to distribute works they have created themselves, alongside media that is in the public domain.
Peer-to-peer services are not, however, altogether driven by political or anti-consumerist motivations - athough most endorse an anti-'spyware' and anti-advertising stance. True p2p is based on an ethic of participation, collaboration, responsible sharing, and the contribution of content for others to enjoy. They depend on users not only downloading content, but also providing it in return.
Skype is somewhat different from the likes of Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, Overnet and so on. Users in this p2p network aren't in it to share files; they're there to share conversation and to expand their social networks, through both its voice application and instant messenger (IM) function. It is, in some ways, like having e-mail, IM and a high-quality phone connection combined in one program which operates over the internet through p2p networks.
The p2p delivery is what makes Skype intriguing. As with a lot of p2p services, users may remain anonymous if they wish, and the strong encryption required to keep calls private while they route through the public web has, according to the New York Times, upset the FBI - who will not be able to wiretap the service. On the other hand, it could benefit callers who wish to make anonymous tip-offs to the emergency services, or journalists who need large networks of sources.
But almost certainly what will decide Skype's success (or not) is its answer to long-distance calls. Just as e-mail and weblogs have opened up opportunities for low-cost textual communication around the world, Skype and other services like it could well begin to allow affordable worldwide calling. Later versions of the program will allow calls from Skype to landlines and mobiles too.
This can only be a good thing. It suggests some interesting possibilities for business users, of course, allowing them to communicate more freely and frequently with international partners.
Perhaps more interesting, however, are the potential ramifications for families and school users for whom international calls are probably a rare luxury at best. International video-conferencing for educational purposes, lending schoolchildren a glimpse into the classrooms of peers across the world, is already possible, but it is difficult to facilitate and set up.
Using Skype as part of a modern foreign languages lesson might be easier to facilitate - just as long as schools have ample computers, broadband access and sets of headphones.
Since Skype allows users to create a personal profile, and then to search for other users with similar interests, this might be a medium for an interesting cross-cultural exchange in which students are able to build up a social network of peers from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities.
Additionally, as it is based on p2p technology a large number of calls from one location can be held simultaneously.
Augmenting this spoken work with reading and writing in a weblog or other online environment could provide students with a fairly compelling set of social spaces through which all three modes of their language learning can be flexed.
Even without the languages work there is potential for good quality exploration in citizenship issues. There is, for instance, enormous potential in providing schools with tools to create educationally- or theme-based peer-to-peer networks through which students can exchange and discuss work they have created, either as individuals or groups.
Care over security would need to be taken, of course, but this could be sufficiently managed by limiting the other users with which students can exchange - just as Skype users can limit who has access to their profile.
Such tools could open up to schools a greater range of resource, without huge expense. The benefits to students, too, are the possibilities for meaningful communication amongst a group of distributed youngsters, converging around common interests.
These are pursuits that business users, educators, researchers and many others are already engaged in. They augment the ways in which information is disseminated, support the emergence of collaborations, and through them findings and completed work can be quickly and cheaply distributed for the benefit of all interested parties.
They are tools aimed at extending our networks of contacts and strengthening our ability to quickly complete important work. Yet most young people are still being confined to the central sources of their textbooks, or to the hugeness of the unregulated internet.
Links
Skype: www.skype.com/home.html
Kazaa: www.kazaa.com/us/index.htm
Napster: www.napster.com
New York Times article on Skype vs FBI: www.nytimes.com
November 2003
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