Memorati

Spaced repetition, commitment and Lingwo.flashcards 0.1.4

After reading this post on Confessions of a Language Addict, I've started thinking a bit more seriously about "the commitment problem" with spaced repetition which I recently wrote about. To summarize the problem: Spaced repetition works great if you are committed to quizzing your flashcards everyday. But inevitably, you will have to stop for some period time.  When you come back, the number of expired cards could overwhelm you.

I was using Memorati™ religiously while I was reading the first Harry Potter book. It was fantastic. After finishing the book, I stopped doing flash cards for about 1 week. I needed a break. I have over 2.500 cards and I was on a very strict regimen. Several weeks have gone by and I have still been unable to catch up.

Introducing: The Lingwo Project

Happy May Day!

This morning I launched The Lingwo Project website. This is an umbrella project representing the following three projects:

Its all in the algorithm, baby.

Last Wednesday, I was discussing learning and spaced repetition with a co-worker. A couple good things came out of this conversation.

Firstly, that I should blog more. This inspired me to finish up an introductory article on spaced repetition that I had been working on for Memorati™. I also decided to try and make Tuesday be blog-day. Since I spend so much time writing each entry, Tuesday will really just be blog-publish-day, but thats fine, whatever gets me to post more.

We also discussed my experience using Memorati with its algorithms and some things that have been unsatisfying about them. Those things are:

  • The aggressiveness of the algorithm used should vary with the number of cards a user has decided to tackle. Aggressive algorithms work better for lots of cards but less aggressive is better for fewer cards.

Audio recording on the web

One of the things I want to include in Memorati™, is the ability to record audio snippets to attach to flash cards. I've been thinking about this for a long time now. There are basically two parts to the problem:

  1. Getting permission to record from the clients microphone.
  2. Encoding the audio so it is small enough to send over the network.

Memorati revamp live! (and dijit.Dialog update)

Finally, the Memorati™ revamp is live! Now that the ground work is laid, expect lots of new community functionality! I'm also going to be begin setting up The Lingwo™ Project website so that I can begin separating the commercial and open source aspects of Memorati as I described earlier.

To follow-up on my dijit.Dialog comments (and here!), I ended-up abandoning my fork. I decided that the original positioning algorithm was acceptable, so my changes have simply boiled-down to:

// so I can use dialog.addChild(...)
dojo.extend(dijit.Dialog, dijit._Container.prototype);

// Called after first showing the dialog, to disable the ability to move it
dialog._moveable.destroy();

Stewardship and naming

So far, I haven't had much luck building a community around Memorati™. The Drupal make-over will help bring more community features to the site and this should help. Which also makes this an opportune time to make any big changes, while, essentially, no one cares...

Right now, Memorati attempts to be three things:

  • A free public website which hosts an online flash card program.
  • A piece of open source software implementing this online flash card program.
  • A community effort for maintaining the program.

But as I mentioned a few months ago, I also want to find a way to monetize Memorati this year. That means that it would be a commercial venture too. Now thats probably a few things to many.

So, sometime after the new Memorati site goes live, I'm going to be making some changes, which I will describe below. First, however, I would like to define some terms:

Harry Potter: The book that taught me Polish…

The title of this post is very misleading... I could already speak Polish at an intermediate-ish level before I started reading Harry Potter. However, this experience has really taught me alot!

What and why?

First, some background. Along with my own evolving ideas about language acquisition I've recently (maybe over the last 6 months?) become interested in the ideas of Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufmann. They both emphasize "comprehensable input" as the primary means to language acquisition. This means reading and listening.

So, I decided that I wanted to read more in Polish. I had two primary goals:

  • To expand my vocabulary.
  • To read something interesting that I would enjoy.

I chose Harry Potter for the following reasons:

dijit.Dialog: To fork or not to fork!

I've been redesigning the Memorati™ user interface to be based on pages and dialogs. Formerly it consisted of a collection of mutually exclusive pages (meaning no dialogs):

Screen shot of Memorati on Browse Cards page.

  • Browse Cards
  • Add Card
  • View Card
  • Quiz
  • Settings

These pages were all accessible at any time from a menu on the left sidebar.

In the new UI, what was formerly "Browse Cards" will become the "Dashboard" with links/buttons for all other functionality. All the rest except for "Quiz" will become dialogs (although, maybe "Quiz" should be a dialog too? Eh?).

Ash Wednesday Update!

I haven't posted in awhile, I apologize! Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, however, I didn't make it to mass because we were hit with a massive blizzard. I walked home from work, partly because the buses stopped running and partly because I'm bad-ass. ;-) It was good exercise.

Here are my projects as of late:

  • Released POE::Component::MessageQueue version 0.1.8! I have to give most of the credit to Paul Driver who really did all the work this release. But its still exciting!

New Year’s Resolutions

It might be a little early to think about this, but its already on my mind. At the end of each year, I like to think back on the previous year, about what has happened, what was accomplished, what wasn't accomplished, what was awesome, what wasn't, etc... It helps prevent the years from just sliding away without taking notice.

For most people new year's resolutions are a joke, but I like them. Probably people don't like them because they feel bad when they don't meet their goals and so'd rather not set them. I like setting goals, even if I don't reach them. The attempt is more important.

For 2008:

  • Pay off my debt. This was a resolution last year too! I got close, but still not there.
  • Study Polish for 2 hours a day until I have a language break-through. I'm hoping this will be a 6 month goal, because I plan to study in Lublin again in July.
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