João Brogueira tipped me to Canada's Nuvvo's LMS integrating Skype into their free elearning service using web 2.0 style AJAX programming methods. I love conversation triggered by context. In this case, inquiring minds with subject matter experts. So many learning management systems do nothing but administer bureaucracy. Savvica's Nuvvo takes its points of contact with students and faculty as opportunities to connect.

Extraordinary edublogger Barbara Sawhill at Oberlin University's language lab in Ohio brings students of Arabic to talk with native speakers in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia using Skype. This triumph over distance only works because Skype's sound quality keeps the high and low tones of sound; telephones and other VoIP software/hardware clip out those parts of speech.

Outside of school, offer yourself as a native speaker or look for language practice partners at Veli Hazar's Language Exchange Partner Service. (Earlier in Skype Journal).

How else can Skype help lifelong learning?

Veli Hazar is building a directory of businesses in Turkey that use Skype to talk with customers. This fills a useful language/geography niche. People always look for businesses that speak their language and use their favorite communication channels. This behavior drove the workplace adoption of the telegraph, the telephone, the fax machine, and email.

Directories like Konush.net will become obsolete if they only focus on Skype. Large existing directories continue to adapt to customer demand. They add fields for alternate contact types (chat IDs, SIP numbers, fax numbers, web sites, and the like) to their databases, enhancing self-serve and operator assisted searches.

Skype is walking away from helping people find each other.

They dumbed down profile search to simplify the form. In the latest release for Windows, 1.4, Skype cut search of the "About Me" field. I used to be able to search that field for "bondage," "bearings," "bicycling," "bacteriologist" or "blonde." I love being able to look for people based on similar interests, needs, goals, or backgrounds, without preconception or structure. Skype's p2p directory is a great place for experimentation.

With a little evolutionary force, we'll see easy group forming per Reed's law, subject to security and performance limits. In December 2004 lots of people put "tsunami" in their profiles to help find each other. Skype just turned that off.