January 2008 — Features
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Face Time
Paltalk currently claims more than 4 million users in the world's largest interactive video community, dubbed PaltalkScene. The service allows users to watch and interact with online video programming, including serialized shows, live events, and user-generated content, as well as interact with each other through real-time voice, text, and video chat.
Using the downloadable PaltalkScene software, users can make free video calls with up to 10 friends. The company's website includes a "movie theater" where members can enter a video chat room with virtual screening rooms to watch video clips.
In November, Paltalk made headlines with the first-ever online interactive video press conference, featuring best-selling author Stephen King, who was promoting the then-upcoming film release of his 1980 novella The Mist.
So the technology for real-time, videobased social networking is out there. But when it finally surfaces in K-12 education in a big way, it will come with a downside, warns Jim Ericson, vice president of marketing for Agilix Labs, an eLearning solutions provider, probably best known for its GoCourse Learning System.
Real-time communication technologies like videoconferencing, Ericson points out, require synchronous interactions, which rob users of one of the most valuable qualities of web-based networking: the ability to time shift—to interact with others whether or not they're online with you at the same time. E-mail, blogs, and wikis all allow for time-shifted interactions; online chat rooms and virtual communities such as Second Life require you be there at the same time as those with whom you are communicating.
"One of the big advantages of virtual education and learning," Ericson says, "is that you can do things on demand, when you want to. We do believe that chatting and videoconferencing have a place. But in our model, it's not as valuable as allowing students to participate in the community on their own terms, whenever and wherever they are. The idea of forcing a synchronous model, where everyone is on at the same time, well, that's what a classroom is for."
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John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Palo Alto, CA.
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