This week marks ten years since the web address www.skype.com was registered. At the time, telephone companies were concerned: by offering free video calls over the Internet, Skype had not only introduced a form of communication more futuristic than mobile telephony (almost, perhaps, the stuff of science fiction), but also fundamentally undermined the communications industry’s business models.
Education has been swift to adopt the new medium and reap some of its rewards. It is now theoretically possible for students to connect face to face with teachers and tutors anywhere in the world: though of course, no technology is ever perfect, and any Skype user will have had his or her fair share of frozen frames, pixelated faces and jerky conversation.
To celebrate this birthday, we would like eLearning Africa News Portal readers to tell us their stories. Use the Comments section below to send us your experiences of using Skype, in an educational context or in daily life, and we’ll post them on the website. Whether you’ve got something inspirational to say, or a tale of digital woe, we’d love to hear it!
Thanks for all your comments so far – and keep them coming! We’ll try to showcase the best stories on our News Portal.
Ever since we discovered Skype in the classroom, Kacherede Primary School, Kumi, Uganda has never been the same.
The pupils have broken all sorts of barriers to learning (geographical, time and costs).
We have Skyped with schools from the US & Argentina, we are involved in a weather project with schools from all the continents.
In summary, the kids and the teachers have learnt quite a lot from their peers overseas, something that wouldn’t be under ordinary conditions.
We use Skype for our weekly Dadamac UK-Nigeria meetings – http://dadamac.net/initiative/uk-nigeria-weekly-meetings.
Those meetings bring a wider, more global perspective to John Dada and his team at Fantsuam Foundation (FF) in North Central Nigeria. The meetings also provide news about FF’s work. The news is shared through blogs (at http://www.dadamac.net) usually written by Nikki Fishman or Frances Dada.
FF has many interwoven programmes for community development. The ongoing stories, drawn from the Skype meeting and published online, have raised the visibility of John Dada’s work at FF and have helped when he has submitted funding proposals. The mixture of Skype chats and blogs also increase transparency. Skype gives opportunities for funders, and other collaborators, to communicate effectively thus improving planning, ongoing collaboration, and follow-up.
In addition to using Skype for weekly meetings we also keep some conversation channels open all the time. Then we can easily leave brief messages to be read when others come online, or we can take opportunities to have quick conversations in real time. Thanks to Skype there can be genuine two way communication with grass-roots community projects.
Most UK-Nigeria Skyping is typed chat, because of bandwidth constraints. However, I do also use audio and video Skype channels for communication with Dadamac contacts who are outside of Nigeria.