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mobile learning

Wednesday, 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

Monday, 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.

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Learning Vocabulary

Friday, 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:

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mobile learning

MediaWiki on a USB-Stick

Learning Vocabulary

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