Spaced repetition is super valuable, but popular spaced repetition systems today fall short for many people unnecessarily.
Here are 6 ways we can improve spaced repetition for the next generation:
9
10
61
Conversation
1 Card creation: Zero friction card creation
2 Card creation: Good cards by default
3 Card maintenance: Eject bad cards quickly
4 Schedule flexibility: Allow people to study more
5 Schedule flexibility: Allow people to study less
6 Review friction: Bring the reviews to the users
2
1
21
Details here:
davidbieber.com/snippets/2021-
but I'll summarize in this short thread to save you some time:
1
1
7
* (1,2): Creating good cards should be as easy as a Google search.
I made a prototype with Browserflow that I've fallen in love with: davidbieber.com/snippets/2021-, and we can push this even further with ML
2
6
* (3) The UX of SR systems should lead users to drop bad cards early and often; let's make keeping bad cards hard
2
5
* (4,5): SR systems should encourage studying when you're most motivated; they shouldn't rely on you studying even on a vacation, or discourage extra studying when you complete your day's review. This requires changes to both algorithm and UX.
4
1
4
* (6) An extra app like Anki is extra friction; brings SR to your email inbox, but you still need to click through to review. Great progress, but we can do even better.
1
3
I want to share these ideas with folks thinking about spaced repetition. So, here's some unsolicited @-ing; I hope you don't mind:
@hermannebbinghaus
3
9
Replying to
Broadly agreed! Though alas, I believe #1 and #2 are deep research projects: my experiments with cloze-driven extracts like the ones you describe have been pretty unsuccessful in the long-term.
I'd love to make progress on these issues, but I'm stretched too thin working on mnemonic medium stuff. If any folks—particularly designers; these problems are mostly design-bound—want to collaborate, my DMs are open!
3
Replying to
I've been happy with one-press cloze for several months now. I wonder what was different in our experiences.
One possibility: cards live directly in roam and so are always in an editable mode, so clean-up friction - like adding missing context - isn't too high.
1
1
Another: the cards you create require more synthesis / a higher level of abstraction that cloze extraction allows for
1
1
Show replies
Do you refactor chunky clozes into Q/As over time or prefer to leave them as blocks?
1
Usually either the former or I end up deleting them.
I think there's a tradeoff between amount of understanding produced per card and time taken to formulate each card. You might get less understanding per cloze but they are more efficient to produce - as a networked mass they might produce more understanding for less cost.
1
Yes, that's right, and that's been Wozniak's argument historically. With low-cost iterative editing, it might be true! It hasn't been my experience personally, though.
1
2
Show replies