Skype

Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. By relying on the familiar ways students use these tools, faculty can enable new forms of communication and engagement in the classroom, permitting extensions and variations of the informal interactions already occurring in classrooms and hallways, and creating new frontiers for collaboration across geographic boundaries.

Skype is a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) application that lets users make free phone calls between Skype-equipped computers and inexpensive calls between Skype computers and landline or cell phones. Skype functions on a P2P model rather than as a centralized application, and it offers features such as voicemail, call forwarding, conference calling, and video chat. In most circumstances, Skype provides access to voice and video communication for a fraction of what other options cost. It allows more frequent contact between colleagues, collaborators, and friends and permits connections with those not likely to be in touch through conventional phone systems.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In an effort to move the net neutrality debate from rhetoric to realistic compromise, a group of telecommunications attorneys and Internet technologists from industry and the nonprofit sector have spent the past six months defining and agreeing upon the many questions surrounding this complex topic. Led by John Windhausen and Rick Whitt, the group has created a document that describes what a net neutrality regime might look like, as well as how it could be realized and enforced. This session will present the paper, offer an academic review of it, and give the audience an opportunity to ask the primary authors questions.

It has been widely assumed that next generation "phone systems" will be based on Internet Protocol private branch exchanges (IP-PBXs). The ever-increasing ubiquity of IP networks can improve upon the current environment of disparate communications systems. To plan for an integrated real-time communications environment, IT staff will need to become well-acquainted with unified communications (UC) systems, enterprise application integration, service provider IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), fixed mobile convergence, service provider application integration, public IM systems evolution, federation between systems, and the future of Skype. This Burton document analyzes the recent developments in converged communications, and recommends next steps.