Like healthcare, education and tech should be a good pairing but money is always driving the tech, which leverages the learner for profit. - Money should not be in healthcare, education and of course other sectors. There are some good uses, assistive tech, Moocs etc but anything commercial is predatory. Khan sold out years ago with the app and gamification.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
180 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
84891 readers
3619 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Like healthcare, education and open source tech is a good pairing, as long as the tech adds, not replaces
That's the key: look at where we were, look at where we're going, is this the kind of progress we want?
Answer, of course, depends on who "we" includes.
Business has been shown to not care about long term implications, as such they should be treated as the fox outside the henhouse - a natural occurrence, but not one to be trusted - with anything.
Gamification per se is not a bad thing. Gamification is anvalid way to get better engagement and retention.
According to recent research, yes.
But research is lacking in the retention of skills and knowledge once the gamification is removed.
Does Duolingo create life long learners, or is it just something to pass the time and feel good about getting a score streak.
My theory is almost all Duolingo users would quit learning if Duolingo went away tomorrow and everyone has to restart at 0 on a new app/service.
I know some avid Duolingo users. After multiple year-long streaks they have learned and retained quite a bit... also quite a bit less than they would have learned and retained after spending a season in an immersion setting where they used the language all day every day. Both routes to learning have their pros and cons... neither one suits everybody.
I was talking about gamification in general. Are you talking specifically about Duolingo?
When gamification is used to persuade or hold a user into a subscribed service. Its predatory. It can be used to influence or motivate learners, classroom or online. But when used to further you being on the app, its not good.
Exactly what I said, gamification is not bad in itself.
Gamification is not the problem. The problem is predatory behaviour.
Is there any other useful edtech than the FOSS app Anki?
Came here to say this: Anki is infinitely better than some scammy ai enabled nonsense.
The challenge is Anki relies on the student being motivated to pursue the education. The solution to that is the student seeing the value and fun in what they're learning. That can partially be provided by gamification, but really a passionate teacher with genuine enthusiasm is the best.
My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.
Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.
Khan academy
Khan Academy has been on the enshitification journey for a while now.
Sal Khan in 2023 proudly proclaimed that AI could revolutionise EdTech with highly personalised tutoring, and made Khan Academy go all in on AI with their Khanmigo AI assistant tutor. Part of this ted talk explicitly has the AI pretend to be historical figures for assistance in history.
Three years later, Sal Khan admitted what all teachers already knew: that the AI tutor failed because most students didn't even both with it. Digging through forums reveals the similar suite of reasons: factual inaccuracies, inability to understand basic arithmetic, and opaque pricing based on "usage."
Didn't stop him from partnering with big tech to offer $10K bachelor degrees though.
Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education | TED Talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education
Why Sal Khan is rethinking how AI will change schools - Chalkbeat - https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/sal-khan-reflects-on-ai-in-schools-and-khanmigo/
This CEO has teamed up with Google, Microsoft, and McKinsey to build an AI degree that could rival Harvard—and it will cost only $10,000 to attend | Fortune - https://fortune.com/2026/04/15/sal-khan-ceo-khan-academy-google-microsoft-ted-ets-higher-education-institute-bachelors-applied-ai-gen-z-college-upskilling/
LessonUp?
ABOUT FUCKING TIME