Learning

This is an interesting study nicely summarized in The Bulletproof Musician.

Learners exposed to two different study methods - blocked vs interleaved practice - preferred the blocked practice method, a learning method known to be less effective. Rather than attribute it to laziness, the authors of the study hypothesized that learner’s simply don’t know what method of practice (study) is more effective so that interpret the more difficult method (interleaved) as being harder.

Speaking of Anki, here’s a Swiss Army knife of database utilities that provides searching, moving and renaming functions from the command line.

On GitHub.

You can do things like this to rename and collect tags:

$ anki_tool mv_tags '(dinosaur|mammal)' animal

Looks cool.

Memorization has a bad reputation in education today, but it underpins the abilities of all sorts of high-performing people. I often refer to this article from 1999 about how to better organize information for memorization.

My favorite pieces of advice:

• Do not learn (memorize) if you do not understand.
• Stick to the minimum information principle.
• Use imagery
• Avoid sets and enumerations
• Use mnemonic techniques.