After months of planning and testing, the Skype pilot kicked off today. With slick new high definition web cams, and the help of the “how to” login sheet, the french language students connected with other students in Noumea. And the French conversations began to flow.
While many staff members have had Skype installed and working fine in their offices on their individual managed desktop machines (ie supported centrally by ITS), up until know it has been impossible to intall and use them “en masse” for use by students in an ITS managed teaching computer lab. But, thanks to the hard work of everybody involved (especially Krstan Risteski, ITS Labs Manager and Liz Burns, ITS System team) a special ‘software package’ was developed, tested, tweaked, and re-tested. Now Skype can be remotely installed in labs by ITS Support staff, with the correct network and software settings so that it actually works within the confines of a teaching lab. The only last minute hitch was that each new web-cam purchased by Arts (they are for use in the new Bld 19 Language labs) needed to have the software drivers manually installed, but thanks to Krstan, this was achieved in time also.
If you have ever taken language courses before and failed to see your instruction through to the end, you may already know how difficult it can be to retain a language in your memory without constant practice. There are now a number of new methods that can be used to help combat this retention problem, so that you are better able to hold onto what you have learned, and use it even when you are not immersed in the culture that speaks that language.