Sobre esta idea
To motivate the topic of spaced-repetition learning software, here are two
quotes from the Wikipedia pages on the German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus,
and the concept of spaced-repetition, respectively:
In 1885, Herman Ebbinghaus published his groundbreaking Über das Gedächtnis
("On Memory", later translated to English as "Memory. A Contribution to
Experimental Psychology") in which he described experiments he conducted on
himself to describe the processes of learning and forgetting.
Ebbinghaus made several findings that are still relevant and supported to this
day. First, Ebbinghaus made a set of 2,300 three letter syllables to measure
mental associations that helped him find that memory is orderly. Second, and
arguably his most famous finding, was the forgetting curve. The forgetting
curve describes the exponential loss of information that one has learned.
The sharpest decline occurs in the first twenty minutes and the decay is
significant through the first hour. The curve levels off after about one day.
Spaced repetition is a method that uses knowledge of this forgetting curve to
increase the efficiency of the learning process, where the subject is asked to
remember a certain fact with the time intervals increasing each time the fact
is presented or said. If the subject is able to recall the information
correctly the time is doubled to further help them keep the information fresh
in their mind to recall in the future. With this method, the patient is able to
place the information in their long-term memory. If they are unable to remember
the information they go back to the previous step and continue to practice to
help make the technique lasting (Vance & Farr, 2007).
Anki is an open-source spaced repetition flashcard program for Windows, macOS,
Linux, Android, and iOS. Widely used by the medical student community [1] (some
estimates suggest roughly half of all US medical students use Anki for
studying) and gaining popularity in the hard sciences [2], this software exists
to help users retain large swaths of material over very long time periods.
However, the internal data format suffers from a number of flaws, chief among
them its incompatibility with most existing collboration software (e.g. version
control systems like git, svn, hg, fossil, or document editors like overleaf,
google docs, etc). The Anki community has already experienced growing pains
related to this issue, and the largest collaborative deck effort, the massive
AnKing deck created for 1st-3rd year medical students, uses a complicated
installation/update process in order to faciliate user-provided corrections to
its content. [3] A system for converting Anki collections to and from
traditional version control formats would go a long way in resolving this
issue.
More concerningly, the user community of Anki is largely at the mercy of
organizations with no oversight [4], who control and gatekeep access to
user-created content on privately-owned servers. Without exception, all
user-created content is hosted on a single server owned by a single individual,
and if this server goes down, loses funding, or experiences data loss, the
community could permanently lose access to decades of its own data. On top of
this, organizations like the AnKing group [5] have begun work on monetizing
this user-created content, breaking the tradition of keeping Anki-related
software free and open source, and charging subscription fees for access to
collaborative deck edits via their commercial, proprietary tool.
The `ki` command-line tool aims to solve all of these issues via a simple
invertible transformation of the underlying SQLite3 database (a
machine-readable-only format) into a directory tree of markdown files (a very
human-readable format). By enabling conversions to and from a format that can
easily be put under version control, `ki` will allow collaboration on
spaced-repetition decks in exactly the same way millions of software engineers
collaborate on open-source projects: by making peer-reviewed edits to a single
source of ground-truth hosted on a public, resilient archive (e.g. GitHub.com)
under an open-source license (enforcing free access to all derivative works).
Hundreds of hours of work have already been put into developing this tool, all
unpaid. It is already a minimum viable product, and usable by developers
willing to put up with a rough-around-the-edges UI and the potential for
occasional bugs and crashes. The source code is freely available on GitHub [6].
A particular emphasis has been placed on writing clean, user-friendly
documentation [7] which demonstrates usage patterns and details the tool's
capabilities.
[1] (https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/)
[2] See Michel Nielsen's essay here:
https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
[3] https://www.ankipalace.com/step-1-deck
[4] https://ankiweb.net/account/privacy
[5] https://www.ankihub.net/coming-soon
[6] https://github.com/langfield/ki/blob/main/ki/__init__.py
[7] https://langfield.github.io/ki/
Impacto
La base de usuarios de Anki se compone en gran medida de estudiantes, y una proporción significativa
de ellos son estudiantes de medicina que estudian para exámenes como el USMLE STEP 1. Casi todos
todos estos usuarios ya tienen cientos de miles de dólares de deuda.
de dólares. No necesitan que se les cobren grandes cuotas mensuales de suscripción para trabajar
con los contenidos que ellos mismos han creado. La adopción de la herramienta
herramienta `ki` puede evitarlo. Otras comunidades de usuarios son los
de aprendizaje de idiomas, y de hecho el programa Anki se creó originalmente para
para que el autor pudiera aprender japonés.
En términos más generales, la disponibilidad de los mazos de Anki en un formato legible en una
plataforma tan pública y ampliamente utilizada como GitHub podría aumentar drásticamente tanto
la disponibilidad de los recursos de aprendizaje existentes y el ritmo de creación de
nuevos datos. También podría ayudar a impulsar la repetición espaciada en la corriente principal, lo que
de la educación formal hacia un aprendizaje más eficaz y alejado de la ineficacia de los profesores.
aprendizaje más eficaz y alejarse de las prácticas ineficaces de profesores y alumnos
(por ejemplo, dar clases, tomar apuntes, releer, subrayar) [1].
[1] Brown, Peter C. Make It Stick : the Science of Successful Learning.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.
Lo que haré con 5.000 dólares
Los 5.000 dólares se destinarán a las PRUEBAS DE LOS USUARIOS por encima de todo. Un proyecto de software técnicamente perfecto,
un proyecto de software rico en características no tiene sentido si la gente no sabe cómo usarlo.
Todo el dinero que sea útil se destinará a incentivar a los usuarios para que den
que den información detallada sobre los patrones de uso, las frustraciones, los deseos/necesidades y los errores en el funcionamiento de la herramienta.
funcionamiento de la herramienta. Esto se puede hacer reclutando en las comunidades online existentes de Anki
existentes en discord, reddit y los foros de Anki. A los usuarios se les pagará
una pequeña cuota ($10-$50) por dar retroalimentación, y se pueden usar recompensas por errores más grandes
para encontrar fallos de seguridad críticos). También se puede utilizar Amazon mechanical turk si
si se necesitan muestras de mayor tamaño. El resto de los fondos se destinará
en el desarrollo de funciones de accesibilidad y la integración con el servicio de páginas de GitHub
de GitHub, que a partir de mayo de 2022 admite la representación en LaTeX de
ecuaciones matemáticas, que se utilizan con mucha frecuencia en los mazos de Anki. Estos servicios, si
Si se construyen, podrían servir como un front-end y un previsualizador para los mazos alojados, haciendo
que los usuarios vean lo que van a obtener antes de descargar el contenido.
Enlaces
Sobre William Blake
Soy un estudiante de doctorado en matemáticas que estudia geometría diferencial y varias variables complejas. ¡También hago un poco de programación en el lado!
