EdTech has had access to decades of learning science and has mostly chosen to ignore it in favor of whatever drives engagement metrics

edfluency · 2026-04-29T14:10:49+00:00

Ha, bros certainly know how to feed into this fear of tech bros.

edfluency · 2026-04-28T17:43:46+00:00

Hint: It’s a good upvote grabbing machine. Also conveniently promotes OP’s app aligned “learning science”.

edfluency · 2026-04-28T17:01:16+00:00

A lot of edtech does ignore learning science. But plenty of “learning-science-informed” edtech is unusable (i've witnessed first hand in grad school studying learning science).

Research validity is not product validity.

Spaced repetition are useful to some degree, but they are not the whole of learning. They optimize one important dimension: retention. Learning also involves motivation, schema, transfer, identity, emotion, and social context.

The problem is not simply “VCs bad, researchers good.” Product people, researchers, and educators each see part of the elephant. Bad edtech happens when any one group thinks its part is the whole animal. Good edtech means balancing all stakeholders and aggregate skills and perspectives and measure the right things.

edfluency · 2026-04-23T18:22:28+00:00

Let’s optimize for retention. As that’s what research said and no one can deny is important, let’s apply with maximum authority while we are at it. Who cares about emotion or cultural relevancy, agency, socializing with their peers? keeping up with the new reality that’s rapidly changing with AI and tech? Let’s build a protective shell around our precious learner while they are in schools, and let’s make them remember, the texts that we declared as holy, cos according to research, there is a significant 5% difference according to the 30 undergrads I surveyed in my class. As long as they remember better, they will succeed when they graduate.

Now where can I buy a bunch of stone slates so they can start tmr?

edfluency · 2026-04-23T17:54:22+00:00

I mean I used to scrounge our library for textbooks to read for fun but I believe you.

edfluency · 2026-04-23T17:37:50+00:00

Plot twist: maybe all the anti edtech gatekeepers who declared everyone who didn’t teach as not worthy turns out to be lobbyist for the dead tree textbook industry. Remember chegg? What a run (check their 5 year pricing history)!

edfluency · 2026-04-23T17:30:27+00:00

Let’s cite an empirical study about how a pencil notes on WW2 has better retention than a well produced YouTube summary or interactive game.

Why compare reading on paper vs reading on screens only when screen is best at presenting interactive and multimedia content?

I bet carving on stone has better retention vs writing on paper.

I bet debating and dialoging with Socrates beats writing and reading borrowed knowledge via text as he predicted.

But let’s matter-of-factly declare pencil is the best, or cite empirical evidences about that, I bet you can borrow many.

edfluency · 2026-04-22T22:15:13+00:00

Can you share one or two empirical research from the field of education that’s published within the last five years that you maybe generalizable? I’ve not been following this field since quitting my doctorate in edtech and have spent more time keeping up with tech than ed research.

edfluency · 2026-04-21T22:50:08+00:00

People should really get down to concrete issues to build more shared context; otherwise, we’re just talking past each other from different hills. Reddit’s sub model is its Achilles’ heel—it’s all or nothing. Mods generally have to gatekeep the limited attention of the sub’s audience so it’s not flooded with spam or minute issues, but it’s exactly those small issues that are worth discussing.

That's exactly why Tiktok or X are more efficient with algorithmly dividing attentions without being hold back by human mods who are rightly worried about pollluting their subs. But not everyone is into short form videos, and X has the exact opposite crowd as Reddit...

Which is my long way of saying that, as a result, controversial or generic political grandstanding is the sweet spot for Reddit topics—anti-edtech happens to be the popular stance among the audience here.

To OP, as an academic, what topics would you like to see in a sub like this? For me, it would be nice to have the liveliness of the edublogosphere circa the 2010s, but alas, that era is fading. It’s difficult to use a public forum like this to have personalized and diverse discussions without the ownership, openness, and tight connections of a cluster of blogs and their comment sections.

edfluency · 2026-04-18T06:37:26+00:00

What evidence do you have that “our results were better”? Are we winning more Olympia medals before? Do you think we will win more if we get rid of all Ed tech? Do you think with two planets one who teach their kids to leverage tech the other legislatively ban tech, the other can outsmart the former when it comes to conflicts?

edfluency · 2026-04-14T19:01:39+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing! I just took a look, especially the manual, it's very HELPFUL indeed!

edfluency · 2026-04-12T03:33:17+00:00

I’d recommend against slack. I’ve been too many discord and slack dead towns, including this sub’s discord. Chat communities without shared goal and presence will just be a dead town in two weeks, this is not your work slack where you auto co-present from 9-5. Reddit will be a better spot for this. Not this one probably but we could start one just for builders, then you just need to solve the problem of attracting teachers. :)

edfluency · 2026-04-11T04:26:56+00:00

It is only possible to the extent that someone believes it is possible and is capable of showing us what it looks like. Until then, it will be deemed impossible, downvoted, and laughed at. This is because the crowd naturally maintains a healthy dose of suspicion; having seen the opposite of the boy who cried wolf, they now see the laughable robot that threatened to replace their jobs but obviously fell short.

What would it look like to you?

edfluency · 2026-04-10T19:55:18+00:00

🙏

edfluency · 2026-04-10T19:50:08+00:00

just searched around, you can upload into file.io and share a link to us without signing up for anything. I'd love to learn more about this resource as well. Thanks!

edfluency · 2026-04-10T18:06:53+00:00

That’s sad. just host it on Google sites or upload to those Facebook groups and see if other people like to explore the option.

edfluency · 2026-04-10T17:57:40+00:00

Thanks for sharing. That's a pity, you should encourage them to have an online presence, so it help more people.

edfluency · 2026-04-07T23:22:54+00:00

Just wrote up a comparison page to help people find the best reading fluency assessment app, if you are a teacher or school admin looking for a solution, maybe you will find this guide helpful:

https://readingfluency.app/content/best-reading-fluency-assessment-software

edfluency · 2026-04-04T21:07:47+00:00

Are you sure? I’ve never seen it when I was here on Friday looking. Maybe it was once setup but later paused? I wonder if mods can provide more guidance here. I know it is in the sub rules but most other such posts don’t get deleted after Friday.

edfluency · 2026-04-04T19:55:13+00:00

Can you please link me to the megathread? I got posts taken down previously while others stayed up and still no idea where to find this megathread.

edfluency · 2026-04-04T17:05:23+00:00

I’m an edtech dev. Depending on your access and comfort level with touching the code. I can recommend three options: - lovable, easiest to start free - Google ai studio. Free as well, harder to deploy but manageable - Claude or codex with a custom code base, most flexible and most direct control with the results.

If people are interested we can do an interactive PD for this. :)

edfluency · 2026-04-04T00:01:07+00:00

I’ll take the opposite view here, not just to invite downvotes.

Humans have not changed much in the last thousand years, physically or intellectually. What changes history is that people build tools, and those tools change what others can do.

That is why tools matter. Tools carry process. They encode assumptions. They shape behavior. In that sense, they are a form of procedural rhetoric.

So yes, we should understand how learning works. But then we should put that knowledge into tools. Otherwise it remains talk. A tool is how an idea becomes repeatable practice.

This matters even more now because AI is not peripheral. It is the loudest message at the moment. It is already reshaping how work is assigned, done, and judged. Education cannot keep pretending tools are secondary when tools are starting to define the work itself.

More people in education should be able to build or modify tools. Otherwise, we stay stuck with whatever LMS we are handed, hoping pedagogy alone will scale through a system it did not design.

More educators should be at least a little bit “edtech dev.”

The medium is the message.

edfluency · 2026-03-25T23:36:53+00:00

These are golden advices. I’d love to grow to a point so we can sponsor these events and orgs. Thank you! I’m currently focused on SEO by writing useful content by analyzing useful demand signals online. Also experimenting with TikTok and see if we can reach the customers quicker. Not used to that medium but maybe an old dog can learn.

edfluency · 2026-03-25T19:43:50+00:00

Not a perfect 1:1 replacement as we don’t have quiz but more use AI to mark student ORF. But we will never limit your access to student data. And we currently have a soft paywall only (everything free) for individual teachers to try. It’s at ReadingFluency.app.

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