Duolingo and Luis von Ahn's Ted Talk

I recently came across the Duolingo site which is in beta.  It sounded interesting enough to pursue getting a beta invite, but it wasn’t until I watched Luis von Ahn, a creator of that mildly annoying CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA anti-spam image that requires us to type what we see in order to prove we are people, that my attention was peaked.

Luis’s description of the background and his role in CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA  are noteworthy.   It’s remarkable that this process helps digitize books.   Beyond that factoid, what caught my attention are his reasons for creating Duolingo and his belief in its potential to harness crowd sourcing to get 100 million people to translate the web in all major languages—not a small undertaking.  This endeavor is worthy of discussion when looked at from a linguistic and second language acquisition perspective, a social networking perspective, and in light of the topic of motivation.

Watch the 17 minute TED Talks with Luis von Ahn entitled Massive Scale Online Collaboration below.  Also, check out the creativity of CAPTCHA art!  I like the humor of this one.  You will not want to miss the CAPTCH Vimeo which resembles Jabberwocky!  It's worth watching.

 

What do you think?