On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 3:12 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > Seems a bit odd to me that you experienced so many problems with Quia > (you should send them feedback)-millions have chosen to use that site > as have college professors.
Millions may've used it; but those same colleges & professors are the same ones using Blackboard - which is, if possible, even worse than Quia. (The cruddiest fly-by-night PHP message board is more usable than Blackboard's forums, to give just one example.) I'd be wary of appeals to popularity w/r/t software popularity, especially online: every person signing up to Yahoo or Hotmail & not Gmail is a damning refutation. > It probably has some glitches but it is an > extremely popular site in the world of academia. Now I realize > mnemosyne offers different services but when I spoke to a half a dozen > college professors none of them used it. Doesn't this community want > the beneficial results of this memory program to be known to others > and more importantly used by others? I would think that the very > intelligent programmers and developers of this site would want the > fruits of their intelligence better appreciated and very accessible to > others. Mnemosyne is about as easy to install as possible for an application written in an interpreter-based language: you download and click on the exe. The site has a clear 'Download' on the sidebar, which takes you to an easy SourceForge interface, and then a click to download. I don't know how you messed that up. You backpeddle on installation, and then complain about importing cards - which is one File menu and dialogue away. (Where do you have to write code? You click on File, click on 'Import cards', and then browse for the text file containing cards. How else would it work? When you open up a file in Microsoft Word, does it prompt you to give the URL of a document in Google Apps or something? No, it asks you for a file on disk.) Now, as to why Mnemosyne isn't used... The right question here is why isn't SRS used in general? (One can't blame specifically Mnemosyne if the problem is universal.) Of the dozens of SRS apps for various platforms and online, why have they all failed to have mass appeal? I suspect the answer is a combination of unobviousness, people not really valuing memorization, the necessary discipline, the solely long-term payoff, and the general lack of available cards*. Even with a great deal of publicity & propaganda, and software/websites that are a dream to use - that still leaves 3 major obstacles, I fear none of which can be overcome. * the nature of the task demands a deep library of thousands of decks, each one of high quality. While Mnemosyne & Anki & a few sites offer flashcards, they don't offer that much and the decks are often of indifferent quality - which is unsurprising, since if you could create high-quality cards, then don't you understand the material very well and will not feel a great need for SRS? > I teach students, as do my colleagues and we would like to use this > but quite frankly we all have experienced problems. If I may make a suggestion: you could start SRS simply by weekly testing. An idea I'd like to try were I a teacher would be to every class, enter 20 or 30 relevant flashcards into a fresh database, and grade them all 4 (in Mnemosyne rankings); now next class's test is whatever Mnemosyne says needs to be reviewed. So each test will be mostly the new stuff learned last class, but also a mix of older stuff as optimal. (Obviously each student having a custom database and reviewing daily would be even more optimal, but the merit of this approach is that it needs no cooperation from the students and can be started immediately. If anyone questions it, you don't need to explain the whole SRS theory - which might make you sound like a flake - but can just say educational research strongly indicates that regular feedback helps students, as it does.) > Now of course I > realize that finding empathy, with regard to my installation problems, > on this board is really quite unlikely because anyone who has > experienced the same is quite frankly not here. I do appreciate that > many of you have tried to sincerely offer help and I will continue to > try to put this software to use. But in the mean time, I think those > who feel the site is so self explanatory that as a test you direct > your non computer savvy but otherwise intelligent acquaintance to the > site and see what he/she says about it. Please forgive me if you think > it an oxymoron to say a non computer savvy but otherwise intelligent > person. > Once again thanks to all of you for your many suggestions and help. -- gwern --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
