I’ve played around with Anki a bit, but never used it seriously because I was never sure what I wanted to memorize, versus look up when needed.
I wonder if it might be better to look at it a different way, using a note-taking tool to leverage forgetting rather than remembering? That is, you could use it to take notes and start reviewing cards more seriously when you’re going to take a test. Afterwards, you might slack off and forget things, but you still have your notes.
After all, we write things down so we don’t have to remember them.
Such a tool would be unopinionated about remembering things. You could start out taking notes, optimize some of them for memorization, take more notes, and so on. The important thing is persistence. Is this really a note-taking system you’ll keep using?
Teaching people to use such a tool would fall under “learning how to learn.” Ideally you would want them to take their own notes, see how useful it is for studying for a test, and get in the habit of using them for other classes. If not, at least they would know that such tools exist.
Back when I was in school, I remember that there was a teacher that had us keep a journal, probably for similar reasons. Maybe that got some people to start keeping a diary, who knows? For myself, I got in the habit of taking notes in class, but I found that I rarely went back to them; it was write-only. I kept doing it because I thought taking the notes helped a bit to remember the material, though.
I’ve played around with Anki a bit, but never used it seriously because I was never sure what I wanted to memorize, versus look up when needed.
I wonder if it might be better to look at it a different way, using a note-taking tool to leverage forgetting rather than remembering? That is, you could use it to take notes and start reviewing cards more seriously when you’re going to take a test. Afterwards, you might slack off and forget things, but you still have your notes.
After all, we write things down so we don’t have to remember them.
Such a tool would be unopinionated about remembering things. You could start out taking notes, optimize some of them for memorization, take more notes, and so on. The important thing is persistence. Is this really a note-taking system you’ll keep using?
Teaching people to use such a tool would fall under “learning how to learn.” Ideally you would want them to take their own notes, see how useful it is for studying for a test, and get in the habit of using them for other classes. If not, at least they would know that such tools exist.
Back when I was in school, I remember that there was a teacher that had us keep a journal, probably for similar reasons. Maybe that got some people to start keeping a diary, who knows? For myself, I got in the habit of taking notes in class, but I found that I rarely went back to them; it was write-only. I kept doing it because I thought taking the notes helped a bit to remember the material, though.