The Geekette Speaketh

I got really interested when Lifehacker featured SuperMemo on their site recently. SuperMemo is a Windows-only software that allows you to make flash cards.  But SuperMemo is only free for its older versions. Fortunately some readers gave other free open source multi-platform alternatives like The Mnemosyne Project and Anki. But the thing that really caught my attention was an OpenOffice.org Impress extension called OpenCards. The basic concept of this extension is to take an Impress or MS Powerpoint file and turn these into flash cards with the slide titles as the front and the contents for the back of each "card".

Each of these flashcard software uses a particular algorithm of spaced repetition.  One of the most well-known techniques was devised by Sebastian Leitner, which is being used by Anki and OpenCards.

Regardless of the flashcard software you end up using, the first step to learning is knowing the right questions to ask.  My way of doing it is to read the whole article first.  Then I read the article again and start making a list of questions and answers as I go along.  Each question-answer pair is immediately logged on to the chosen flashcard software.

At this point OpenCards helps me kill two birds with one stone.  While I'm able to take down notes for later review, I'm also able to make a presentation which I most likely will be able to use at some point in the future.