Brillyant comments on Open Thread, November 15-22, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Anki help needed...
My girlfriend is in nursing school. She had been doing well on here tests until recently, when she marginally failed a rather important exam. Anki came to mind as tool that may help her through the upcoming tests this semester, as it seems many people here at LW speak very highly of it. I'm looking for some general 101 help and suggestions in regard to Anki...
Why does it work? Best practices for optimizing test scores with Anki? Drawbacks or things to avoid? Success stories? Are there people with learning-styles where Anki would not be effective?
As I try to come up with questions, I realize I'm pretty incompetent at even knowing what to ask... Any knowledge you think would be useful would be appreciated. Thanks!
People don't have something like inherent learning styles. They have strategies for learning. Using Anki is a learning style.
One frequent error when making Anki cards is to think that the card should contain the solution to an exam question. That leads to cards that are too complicated.
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good introduction to how SRS works.
Could you expand on this? (Or point me to something already written.)
Perhaps wikipedia would be a good starting point.
So it seems to me that it's actually a lot of different theories, and none of them has an experimental proof. The evidence seems to actually point the other way.
My interpretation is, if you start using pictures in your class and you get better results, that's not because you have finally provided something useful to the "visual learners", but because you have provided something useful for everyone.
Could you define a question? There seems to be a lot of things that I could say on the topic.
Are you talking about basically the same stuff in Viliam_Bur's comment?
Did you mean to say "strategy" instead of "style" here?
Thanks.
Don't overcomplicate it. Anki allows you to create many "fields" for the card, but you often need two (question, answer) or four (question, footnote for question, answer, footnote for answer). Start now.
Don't worry about creating too many cards, or getting your answers wrong. You learn even by getting wrong answers. The only failure is to stop using Anki. -- Unless the questions are badly designed, in which case don't hesitate to redesign them. For example if there are two questions you often confuse with each other, try replacing them with a question "what is the difference between X1 and X2?".
Create some schedule for using Anki. For example: "the first thing after I start my computer".
I've been using Anki for the past few months, and recommend it for learning things. It's also a good way of making use of a daily commute.
The Lesswrong Wiki has pointers to some of the places it's been discussed here.
As a quick summary:
"As part of the ???? pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area" reward
"As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in ???? located within the ventral tegmental area" nerve cell bodies
"As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ?????" ventral tegmental area
Gwern's article is a good place to start.
The problem I've seen with trying to sell people on Anki in the outside world is that many places will give you printable flash cards. An easy way to get these into Anki would go a long way.
Coverting them depends entirely on how the cards are formatted. If you get them in some digital file you could convert them into a table and import them into Anki.
However the more I use Anki the less I think of Anki as flashcards and the more I think of it as a new medium.
With a stack of printable cards you go through the cards till you think you know them all. You usually try to review similar cards together. With Anki you don"t review similar cards together but spread them out over time.
People often want to brute force information into their brain with flashcards while Anki is primarily about making sure that you can remember what you learned.