S is for Skype

Oh, hey, the alphabet doesn't end at 'R'! Whaddya know.

Skype! It's how we online types do class. (Texas Tech also has a chatroom platform thing that only works a little bit when it's feeling up to it. It causes me new frustration every single week. So I'm not blogging about it.) I never used Skype until this semester, and I've no idea how to call people on my own. I just log on before class time and wait for the little chime to tell me I have an incoming call.

As it happens, quite a few people have asked in the past few days "how it works" to have class in Skype. My answer? I don't know. I don't dare push too many buttons. It took me an embarrassing un-muted conversation on my first night of class to even find the mute button, so I haven't gone for anything more complicated than that yet.

This is my Skype profile pic. It came
from a day when I was short on inspiration
so I put the object of my non-inspired
on my head. Which worked, btw.
One of my classmates says she now
imagines that I have something balanced
on my head at all times during class.
I told her to leave off the "during class" bit
and it would be pretty accurate.

To answer another common question: no, we don't do video calls. As I understand it, that takes up too much bandwidth on some people's computers and it's just not worth it to have people crashing out all the time. In one class, though, our instructor asked us on the first day to please upload profile pictures so we all have a face to look at while we're hearing one another's voices. I was skeptical at first, but it turns out it really does help: I recognise voices in that class much better than in the other class without the pictures to assign to a voice. It's kind of wild the way brains work! (This brain, anyway).

Also, considering how much I wave my hands around, play with whatever's in reach so I can concentrate on listening, and pick up my computer and carry it around the apartment to make another cup of tea, it's just as well that my classmates can't see what I'm doing.

Do you use Skype? Do you know what all the buttons are for?