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mobile learning

March 22nd, 2006

You think vocabulary learning on your desktop is just too inconvenient - as it would be a perfect activity to do during waiting/transition time?

The supermemo.net academy allows you to learn via web frontend, learn by e-mail or with a PocketPC PDA. If you decide to use more than one option, the online learning data and the data on your PDA can be synchronized with each other. The system works very good but is officialy still in a beta testing phase. The PDA application is provided for free at this stage. There is also a huge amount of prepared learning material available, most of it free of charge. The primary focus are language learning programs, which include voice-data from native speakers. Learning vocabulary with the Supermemo method is one of the most efficient learning methods that I know of. I am a long time user of the desktop-program Supermemo, which uses the same algorithm as the online version (see my post about Learning Vocabulary).

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MediaWiki on a USB-Stick

March 20th, 2006

Want to have your own Wiki or Blog System on a USB-Stick to organize your notes, to-do lists, whatever? MediaWiki is one of the best software to do this (used by Wikipedia). You can get your own portable wiki running in about 15 minutes!

1. get the Uniform Server package:

http://www.uniformserver.com/

download the zip archive and extract it on your usb stick. (Or better to a crypted truecrypt volume on your stick if you want to secure you data)

2. get Mediakwiki

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

and extract Mediwaiki to diskw\www

3. install your wiki / blog software

for software with web installers, just point your browser to it:

e.g. http://localhost/wiki/config/index.php

using other software you might have to change the config file manually
DONE!
This is the quick and dirty version. You might want to change some details especially regarding the security settings!

A detailed guide is available here.

Posted in Uncategorized, gtd | 1 Comment »

Learning Vocabulary

March 17th, 2006

There are many ways of learning a foreign language. Whatever way you chose, you have to deal with simple vocabulary learning as well (there are some exceptions though - I will come back to this in a later post).

Many methods for learning vocabulary exist. They vary a lot - from reading the vocabulary list in your exercise book to using mnemonics and intelligently scheduled repetitions. If you are using a computer to help you learn vocabulary, there is a lot of “Flash Card” software out which emulates the manual method of using Question&Answer index cards and reviewing stacks of them.

There is usually a confusion between learning a new vocabulary item and remembering it. You have to learn it initially and then take care that you do not forget it by reviewing it regularly.

The problem of most flash card software: you have to decide when and what to learn. If you have too big gaps between your repetitions, the time and effort will skyrocket, if they are too short you are learning inefficient. The best way is to let the software decide when and what to repeat/review. It has the benefit that the computer using an good algorithm is far better in scheduling what to review than you are. It will also make it harder for you to procrastinate. You have to do a number of repetitions each day. The key to efficient/effective learning is to do your review regularly (that means every day).
As I said - there is a lot of software out there, but only a few that schedules repetitions for you:

Pauker, free (using the Leitner Card File system)
Supermemo, commercial (using the Supermemo algorithm)
FullRecall, commercial (using an artificial neural network)

There are some other programs as well. All of the programs above are using different scheduling algorithms. Many users claim that supermemo has the most efficient scheduling algorithm but I think it is not very important which one you use, as long as you do your repetitions every day. These programs are for repetitions only, you have to actually learn the vocabulary items first (an exception is “Pauker”). A very good way to do this is using mnemonics. Mnemonics is a big and interesting topic which can not be covered in this post. You can find further information here:

Posted in learning | 2 Comments »

Incremental Reading: Dealing with Information Overflow

March 15th, 2006

You want to read your favorite blogs, get e-mail newsletters every day, you have websites you check regulary, newsgroups, mailing lists, forums, interesting Wikipedia articles - a lot of digital input you want to keep up with. But unless you make reading on the computer your full time job - you can’t. So how to select the really important stuff out of it and keep an overlook of everything?

Recently RSS became popular and made some aspects easier. RSS feeds can help you to get all the information together without opening hundreds of websites every day to check if something has changed. You can usually select special channels of interest to get more specific news. On the other side you probably have to deal with a larger amount of information.

But the biggest problem is: when and how to read/process all the information?

Sometimes you only want to read about a specific topic, sometimes you just want to read a bit of a complicated article or just read about anything randomly to build new connections / enhance creativity. You can all do that with incremental reading and do not have to worry to miss something. Sooner or later (you can influence that) it will appear in your incremental reading process.

So how does it work?

You collect all the information you want to process and store them in one place. The you review all the articles (or any other kind of information) randomly or by category. You can highlight important parts, set a reading point (bookmark), extract fragments and generate Question-Answer items for later repetitions.

I am currently using Supermemo for incremental reading and can recommence it very much (I do not know any other software which supports it, if you know something please write me an e-mail). You can however “emulate” the process with other tools as well.

What about a classic knowledge base?
Software that helps you build a knowledge base is good for storing information and searching in it. But you still have to do deal with the scheduling if you want to review information you are not actually searching for.

the basic work flow for incremental reading:

*try to get most of the input from one application (e.g. an RSS reader), so you do not have to check many different places/websites
*go through all you RSS feeds
*make a quick decision (title, tags) for every article if it is worth reading
*import the articles in you incremental reading software (you can copy & paste to Supermemo)
If you have a tight schedule, you can limit yourself reading for 30min / one hour per day, or just do a bit of incremental reading when you have some time. But you do not have to read each interesting article completely because of fear to forget about it if later if you do not read it immediately. Instead of that you can get things done and read whenever you find some time.

You can get a good in-depth article about incremental reading by the author of Supermemo here.

Posted in learning, gtd | 2 Comments »

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment - Day 6

February 22nd, 2006

problems! My cold symptoms got worse - or: I definately got a cold. I had to do an unscheduled nap at 4:00am when I was really fucked up and overslept the first time since starting this experiment (from 4:00am to 8:30am). Now I am not sure what to do. I want to recover as soon as possible but I do not think continuing this experiment would be very beneficial to it. I wonder what other polyphasic-sleeper do when they are ill. When I am ill I usually stay in bed and get a lot of sleep - but this not really compatible with polyphasic sleeping - is it?

Posted in polyphasic | 3 Comments »

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment - Day 5

February 21st, 2006

Last night was surprisingly good - it was actually the first night in which I could engage in real productive work (I was hacking my first Ruby on Rails app ). After my 6:00am morning-nap I got some cold-like symtoms which are worrying me a bit. It got worse during the day. I have no idea if it is related to my sleep experiment (maybe my immune system is not as good a normally now!?) or just bad luck. Let’s see…

Posted in polyphasic | No Comments »

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment - Day 4

February 20th, 2006

uptime: 88 hours (not sleeping more than 30minutes straight)

Last night was better than before. I was not overly tired at night but got a bit tired after my 6:00am morning nap. My alertness is still not normal during the day but I am able to work and do not feel sleepy most of the time. It feels all a bit weired to see people getting up in the morning, going to sleep in the evening and getting up again - but for me it is still the same “day”. In fact there are no “days” anymore…

Posted in polyphasic | 1 Comment »

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment - Day 3

February 19th, 2006

Last night the time between 2 and 5am was hard again, but I made a list with a lot of non-thinking work before and had enought to do to keep me awake. In the morning I felt a bit groggy but it was not that bad. Until now I did all my naps in time and did not oversleep even once. Actually I feel better than I have expected after reading all the polyphasic-sleeper bloggers writing about the hard adaption phase. I am not sure if it will get worse though…

I did the following preparation before starting this experiment:

not drinking caffeine (coffee, coke, soda, tea, …) for 30 days
get up at 6:00am every day
get a good reason to do this experiment

As caffeine interferes a lot with polyphasic sleeping (or sleeping in general) I stopped consuming it for 30 days to get off this habit (I drank a lot of coffee before). I decided to get up at 6:00am each day to train the self discipline of getting up even if I do not want to. Finally I decided starting this experiment from pure curiosity as there are very different opinions about it.

Posted in polyphasic | 4 Comments »

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment - Day 2

February 18th, 2006

My first night was ok, the toughest time was as expected between 2:30 and 6:00. Today I feel a bit drowsy but quite good. It is still possible to do some brain work

Posted in polyphasic | No Comments »

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment - Day 1

February 17th, 2006

Recently I was reading a lot about learning methods and how sleep effects the learning process. Many people claim that free sleep is the best way of sleeping for optimal learning progress and memory retention. I am a big fan of the learning software Supermemo whoes author did quite a lot of research on sleep and also suggests this method. I have tried free sleep for about a month and must say that I felt indeed very alert during that time. The problem was that I was sleeping really long and that did not change after weeks. My wakeup-time varied +-2 hours each day, which made it very difficult to stick to my morning-routine. After reading How to Become an Early Riser on Steve Pavlina’s Blog I tried his suggestion to get up at a fixed time and go to bed when sleepy. That worked quite well for me. He later blogged about his polyphasic sleep experiment to which he adapted very successfull. I was curious about it and did some research on the net. There are very different opinions available. Some people say they adapted to it and feel alert and energetic. Others say it is not even possible to stay on this schedule for more than a short time. So I just decided to give it a try by myself

I will use the Uberman schedule which consists of six 20-30minutes naps in 24h. My nap schedule:

2:00 - 2:30
6:00 - 6:30
10:00 - 10:30
14:00 - 14:30
18:00 - 18:30
22:00 - 22:30