Electronic Brain-Friendly Flashcards
No matter how instantly available information becomes in the future, I believe memorization will always have a place in education. However, that place need not be back with the dinosaurs. Memorization tasks benefit greatly from electronic assistance. Let me explain.
Some foreign language students think nothing of memorizing large numbers of foreign words, and some medical students think nothing of memorizing large numbers of medical terms. Their trick? Electronic flashcard programs that adjust the frequency and timing of the cards in a manner that neuroscience has found most conducive to the creation of long-term memory. What the programs do, in effect, is show a person a particular flashcard and then ask how well the person knows the flashcard. When the flashcard next appears depends both on when it last appeared and on how well the person reported knowing the card. New cards appear frequently; known cards appear less and less frequently as time goes on.
To learn more about electronic flashcard programs, I recommend you visit both the Anki and the Pauker websites. Anki is from Japan; Pauker is from Germany. Both websites offer free electronic flashcard programs, request donations to support their work, and explain why spaced repetition is an effective learning strategy. See
http://ankisrs.net/ and
http://pauker.sourceforge.net/ The latter website explains, “Pauker uses a combination of ultra-short-term, short-term, and long-term memory. You can use it to learn all the things efficiently you never want to forget, like vocabulary, capitals, important dates, etc.”
