Some of you may already be aware of Duolingo, the free language-learning program. I’m currently learning Turkish with it. Since I’m not involved in any of the gamified courses at Procom, Duolingo has helped me understand, from the user’s perspective, how this particular mode of delivery works. One effective service is the reminder bot, which badgers students every day to keep up. This disembodied pesterer throws the responsibility for learning squarely on the student without the presence of an easily dismissed human educator.
Duolingo has another relevance to our discipline, particularly on the topic of participatory culture and crowdsourced content. In a 2011 TED talk, Luis von Ahn, the computer scientist behind Duolingo, explains how his first project, CAPTCHA, was used to digitize unreadable texts through crowdsourcing. He then explains how Duolingo uses massive-scale online collaboration to translate Wikipedia entries into multiple languages. Apparently we unpaid translator/learners somehow help to keep the whole project afloat.
