bobo23.net » learning

mobile learning

bobo — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:13:38 +0000

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).

Learning Vocabulary

bobo — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:30:44 +0000

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:

Incremental Reading: Dealing with Information Overflow

bobo — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 09:39:19 +0000

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.