On 7 December 2010 21:52, Chris <[email protected]> wrote: > As for Randi, the best advice I can give is take the time to read > through www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm and you should be able > to make fantastic cards. It's a quite long page, but it is > excellent. I use a whole bunch of different techniques on my cards-- > that page will give you an idea of most of them. Using a broad range > of techniques and judging an appropriate one for each card, I am able > to learn a ton of information very quickly. > > [...] >
> P.S. I do understand the basics of learning (e.g., that cramming is > not optimal)--I am consistently getting 100% in my tests thanks to > Mnemosyne (along with understanding how to optimize the cards for > recall in other contexts). > > It's hard to argue with perfect scores! Personally, I found it very difficult to use SRS to study more abstract topics than vocabulary. Back in 2007, my plan was to create cards to embody all of the knowledge required for upcoming final year CS exams, and my approach was largely a failure. However, I hadn't read the excellent advice on constructing effective cards on the Supermemo site. It seems like the main difficulty is choosing exactly what information to put in a card, and to encode it in a way that it is somehow meaningful for the brain. A few days ago I started making a set of cards for Rubiks cube "last layer" algorithms, just as an experiment really. They consist of an illustration of a certain pattern on one face of the cube on the front, and a series of moves on the back (for example, "Fw' (L' U' L U) Fw D2 (R U' R') D2 R2"). I immediately found that these cards were immensely more difficult than vocabulary cards, since they're composed of lots of information which is practically meaningless - in terms of subconsciously finding an association hook. Both the visual pattern and the series of moves were extremely hard to remember and to link together. I've started to treat the problem by coming up with a representation system which maps the both the visual pattern and the move sequence into sentences, which are much easier to remember since they mean something to the brain. It's still difficult though... But with more general topics it's worse, since there isn't one set format for the knowledge - or systematic way to proceed - as in my Rubik example and in vocabulary learning. If you have any advice on building useful cards that capture the important knowledge without being a tremendous time sink (e.g. an explosion in the number of cards) that isn't in the Supermemo pages, I'd love to hear it. -- 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.
