Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)
supermemo.com
supermemo.com
If you understand a subject, then it means that you have learned it effectively.
In my experience with teaching at university, I have found that the wish of students to understand before learning is actually a great barrier to comprehend a subject.
In order to build intuition on a subject, a student should first try to apply it, play with it (without understanding it) and then understanding will come. But I have yet to witness a student which understand a subject without being able to use/apply the subject.
Take the notion of electric field. You could try to understand it before learning how to use it. Good luck. You are not a fish, so you probably have no sensors of electric field on your skin, and thus you have no prior notion to cling to. I contend that it is virtually impossible. Or you could try to use the concept of electric field to compute forces on charged particle, or compute the electric field created by a charge, or you could build a program that represent the electric field in space. Doing this requires no understanding, just boring substitutions in the definition of the electric field. But doing that forces you to build understanding (its a vector, it changes direction with the sign of the charges, etc, etc)
Another example is understanding how to bike. You could try to understand how balancing on a bike so that it stay upright, understand how moving the handlebar right makes you turn left or, you could just try to bike, and then understand how it works out.
So my advice: don't try to understand. Do, and do again untill you have learned. Not the other way around.
At electrical engineering they still tried to teach me in the same way. Giving me assignments with little context. What saved me in the end were textbooks and the internet.
The easiest way for me to understand new concepts are the subsequent generalizations or extremes. Complex numbers? Quaternions. Gradients? Clifford algebra. Sets? Categories. Fourier transform? Wavelets.
Sure there might be people who benefit from solving the puzzles from their teachers, but it assumes that every mind works the same way.
Then, I get to Calculus III, and my instructor introduces each concept by showing us a complicated-but-ultimately-intuitive formula for something, then deriving the "shortcut" step-by-step. While most of the students griped that it was boring, I found it quite interesting, and for the first time in my university career I felt like I could grasp calculus. I made an A-.
There are other instances of this, as well, but that one was probably the most dramatic. I don't know what it is. I came up with a handful of analogies just now, but none of them seemed particularly satisfying, so I gave up. Perhaps it's just a quirk, I dunno :)
Calc II, I had a guest/evaluation professor. Disorganized. Poor descriptions. No context. I really struggled with that class.
They didn't renew the Calc II professor's contract. But the damage was done, for my class.
http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/weeks//journal/elby-ajp...
This is so so true so some level I think our desire to understand everything beforehand is just a lazy strategy. Probably either to learn only what is easy or what is useful. Sense of wonder and discoverablity which makes putting the effort in a joyous activity is gone from us. Our profit mazi
On the contrary Children just keep practising until they learn. I wish I can go back to stage where my 2 years old daughter is.
I have found it useful enough that I'm extending its use to other subjects I'm interested in.
Has anybody used Anki and Supermemo have thoughts on the two? I've never used supermemo - would be very interested to hear if it is worth looking into vs Anki for any reason.
I've been using Anki for 5 years now and have about 10,000 notes. I don't use it for foreign language learning. I would not feel comfortable investing that much effort into a closed-source platform effectively run by one person (Piotr). Also, thanks to Anki being open source, I've written a handful of simple plugins for myself.
It seems to me that the Anki card browser is quite bad at this, but maybe I'm just bad at using it!
2. If you don't remember that you already have something, it means Anki is failing you, because the whole point of it is to help you remember.
3. BUT! it doesn't really matter if you add the same note several times, it will just make it appear for review more often.
For example, I know it's possible to create a filtered deck which collects notes from several different decks. I can therefore use each deck to organize the different subjects and practice all of them by reviewing the filtered deck. Or do you mean the hierarchical-tag add-on? Or something else?
I have a custom note format that I use, with custom fields and custom formatting. It looks something like this:
Front
Back
Context
Source
Date
Author
Hint
Extra
Reverse
Here's the note template I use (sans formatting, which is standard CSS):
Front:
<header>
Deck: {{Deck}} {{#Tags}}♦ Tags: {{Tags}}{{/Tags}}
</header>
{{#Context}}
<div id="context">{{Context}}</div>
{{/Context}}
<div class="front">{{Front}}</div>
{{#Hint}}<div class="hint">{{hint:Hint}}</div>{{/Hint}}
{{FrontSide}}
<div class="back">
<hr>
{{Back}}
</div>
<br>
<div class="extra">{{#Extra}}{{Extra}}{{/Extra}}</div>
<br><br>
<div class="metadata">
{{#Source}}Source: {{Source}} <br>{{/Source}}
{{#Author}}Author: {{Author}} <br>{{/Author}}
{{#Date}}Date: {{Date}}{{/Date}}
</div>I got supermemo advanced english course (20k phrases) around 2004 as a present and started it in 2005. Initially I thought it will take 2..4 years. Exactly 10 years later, on September 2015 I was at 19k. I reached last 20k phrase (but not finished the course) around spring 2016. I ended doing it in August 2016. I learned every day around 10..15 minutes. During those 10 years I had around 3 breaks of 2..4 weeks each which of course resulted in huge amount to material to rehearse after the break. I had multiple one day slips.
My conclusions:
* I would did it again!!
* It was tough and I was thinking of stopping multiple times
* The biggest thing I got is grit (will power) strengthening - I didnt expect it, and IT IS GREAT
* Of course better english command came also with the course :)
* It impacted (in subtle) ways my approach to learning, which I see much better now with implementing on my own repeating strategies on every possible area
* Use supermemo mobile apps (it was not possible in 2005)
* For foreign languages, db with sound is ultra worthy - I picked up much better pronounciation on the way, while didnt expect it.
Ask me if you want to know more.
Trivia: I had to have virtualbox VM with old windows xp on my every laptop, just to have supermemo installed and available there :)
Guessing from my memory, average repetition number over that 10y would be around 100 per day.
BTW: You can start with smaller db. e.g. I started in the middle doing Russian one and used a 5k one.
"I would did it again!!"
or this:
"Of course better english command came also with the course"
(among a choice of several examples) should tell you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of SuperMemo after 10 years of learning.
But I guess that argument doesn't hold water, since rdslw is surely also exposed to a lot of other material in English.
And yes, this specific course rather wasn't the most effective one (but probably best at that time). There were multiple problems with this supermemo db: many simple phrases I already knew, but also lot of words you never use (afterwards). Also the biggest problem were circular errors (as I called them): A>B but also A>C or B>D, where my brain was struggling with one knowledge fact replacing the other one and again..
Especially that I said 'better' not best/perfect etc. As someone commented, SR is not really good for grammar.
But thanks for spotting my mistakes :)
Anti-disclaimer: I'm not in any way connected to supermemo, having profits etc. It's funny that my post could have been seen as a promotion :)
Summaries at the top, always.