| You know those fancy electronic notebooks? They're barely better than actual notebooks. They all seek to emulate the pen and paper experience, they go to great expense and make it a focus of their advertising that they feel like real pen and paper. Why wouldn't I just use pen and paper? I believe electronic notebooks haven't yet realized their greatest potential, spaced repetition. I want to take my notes in an electronic notebook, then review my notes and extract parts of them to become spaced repetition items. This is something I would happily have a dedicated device for, and would pay $1000+ for such a device, but they don't yet exist. After taking notes, natural hand made notes, I imagine creating spaced repetition "flashcards" would work like so: 1. Review notes and draw a square around something I would like to memorize; perhaps a fact I have written, or a hand drawn chart or diagram. This square becomes a "flashcard". 2. Optionally, I may hide (by blurring, or pixelating, etc) part of the flashcard. When the time came for study, these flashcards would be presented to me following a spaced repetition algorithm: 3. Present the flashcard, including all blurring and pixelation. 4. When ready, the user is shown the full unobscured flashcard. The user may also toggle the surrounding page the square was originally extracted from, this gives the user context. 5. The user can then judge how well they remember the flashcard. The user presses a button indicating how well they remembered the flashcard. This feedback goes back into the spaced repetition algorithm. The important innovation here is that users can easily combine hand-written and hand-drawn notes and a spaced repetition algorithm. In Anki, you can import pictures, but this is burdensome. You can write markdown or LaTeX, but those suck compared to just drawing something by hand. Studies have shown that hand drawn notes aid in memorization. The would has never seen hand drawn notes easily combined with spaced repetition, and I believe it would be better than any other memorizing scheme we've yet encountered. |
Image Occlusion is available via a third-party app[1]:
The app is open to pull requests (raise an issue/pop into chat), and provides an API which allows external apps to create cards.
[0] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/releases
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.infinyte7.ankiimageocclus...