Frank Wolf
2008/10/03 07:09
Technology
In this article I want to introduce some general aspects of learning psychology that will finally leading to the concept of flash card based learning and why it makes sense.
Learning as simple mental work
Having to learn still sounds like a penalty. Above all a lot of what is learnt is forgotten - fairly quickly.
Despite all modern teaching methods not much is learnt in classical "lessons". Also little is learnt if we sit down and begin to just read the script, book, booklet, brochure, web page or presentation and try to concentrate. We try to memorise, and try to recognize certain laws that we underline or highlight. Most people even do not know what concentrations means at all. I cannot blame them. And to be hones: I do not know it myself.
Mysterious "concentration"
I only know what it felt like: sit down, be quiet and to strain oneself. Some people touch their front or tear their hair, drink far to much coffee or smoke to many cigarettes. Thinking seems to be the most important part: so one stares for minutes on our vocabulary or text as if we could mesmerize it. This then is called memorising or concentration for short. As enlightened learner we know that most thinks have to be repeated about 7 times till we "know" them. So it comes that some think that they are too old to learn.
But everybody can learn 10 languages!
So Berlitz and his students showed.
Not everybody is gifted? Might be true - even though I am not convinced.
Anyway: what we know for sure is that we are getting better as we train. But how?
Everybody knows Pavlov's Dog: Pavlov was a Russian scientist who showed the connection between stimuli without meaning (ringing of a bell) and a stimuli with meaning (getting food). If applied repeatedly together a dog will have salivation if he senses the bell ringing. Psychology calls this classical conditioning. The ringing bell is called stimuli and the salvation is the reaction. The same happens if we learn something knew: if we hear the French word" mère" for the first time we are a like a dog hearing the ringing bell albeit on higher level. "mère" is a stimuli with no meaning till we know that its the French word for "mother". Than mother becomes the correct reaction in the sense of classical conditioning. So we are all dogs reacting to certain stimuli? No. We will not react and will not try to react if there is no incentive. Even though the principle remains important.
Forgetting
So know we know how things are learnt in principle. But what to do about the fact that we forget most of the thinks we learnt even insights that learning is some kind of incentive driven form of classical conditioning?
Ebbinghaus found out that we only keep about 20% of things in mind that we learnt properly. And we even do not now what these 20% are!
This is where a basic learning principle enters the stage: flash card based learning. Using flash card and an bunch of boxes helps us to separate thinks we learnt properly from those we forgot. Of cause this is just part of the way. But let constrain on this for this time.
Mediabird and flash cards
This principle is used in Mediabirds training component:
By creating question
or definition markers
you can fill a virtual flash card box that you can use to repeat facts appropriately.
Steps in Mediabird:
-
Select some text that is related to the question you think is relevant (incentive).
-
Click on the insert box in the upper left of the card editor component and choose question or definition. Now you can either use the marked text as answer, as (part of the) question or definition or define you answer explicitly.
Fabian Gebert
2008/09/04 11:21
Technology
This tutorial will cover how to design a topic from scratch using Mediabird. Even though the technical steps introduce Mediabird, it is not required to use that system to follow the idea of this tutorial.
The idea of this approach is to collect a number of questions, answer them and create flash cards out of the questions that allow to practise the content.
Creating the questions
- Open the "Import and split document" panel
- Click on "Paste from clipboard"
- Enter the last question that belongs to the topic you want to cover
- Enter questions which are necessary to be answered prior to answering the last question and work this way until you have enough questions to cover the whole topic
- State the prerequisites that are necessary to answer the first questions
Structuring the topic
- Click on "Finish pasting"
- Decide which questions are to be on a separate content card and which should go together
- Click on each question which you want to have on a separate content card
- Advanced questions such as more complicated stuff or off-topic ideas should go into the advanced category
- Illustrative questions such as examples or detailed explanations should go into the illustrative category
- Re-arrange the questions if necessary
- Specify a topic and category using the text fields at the bottom
- Click on "Import"
Entering the answers
- Load the topic into the card editor
- For each question, enter the answer below the question
- To make the topic easier revisable, select each answer one after the other and use "Question about selection" from the "+"-menu. Enter or paste the question into the question field and click "OK"
- You can optionally remove the question from the content part since you have inserted it as a separate question marker onto the marker bar
Memorizing the important facts of the topic
- Go back to the main view
- Click on the topic you have just created and select "Train this topic"
For those who are interested in trying out Mediabird, use http://www.mediabird.net/mediabird/start
Fabian Gebert
2008/08/25 13:22
News
During the next days, we will substantially improve user's experience by adding an in-app help that lets the user know about the Mediabird concept and the way the application works.
After that, we will concentrate on collaboration and organization features.
Fabian Gebert
2008/08/21 15:56
Development
In order to install a LaTeX distribution on a web server, including dvipng support and some basic LaTeX packages, you can proceed as follows:
-
Download the latest net installer from CTAN server
-
If you use Unix/Linux, install the package perl-tk if you want the GUI installer.
-
Follow the guide in the attachement, or just select the packages from the lists in the way you like. Make sure you select the architecture that matches the architecture of your webserver (probably GNU/Linux)
-
Create a zip from the files in the texlive folder being created (in the example that is "~/texlive".
-
Upload the zip file to the server
-
If you do not know how to extract the zip on your server (but your server supports PHP), try creating an empty PHP file unzip.php with just
-
<?php system('unzip texlive.zip'); ?>
-
You will now be able to access the latex binaries in the folder texlive/2008/bin/i386-linux relative to where you have extracted the files.
This is quite useful if you want to render LaTeX equations as PNG but your server does not support LaTeX nor dvipng/convert/ghostscript.
Download tutorial as PDF
Fabian Gebert
2008/08/19 17:47
Technology
It has been discussed a lot how to get the nodes that represent the current selection in a certain browser window. There is the W3C way of doing it, using the Range
and Selection
objects and there is the IE implementation with selection, TextRange
and ControlRange. This article explains how to get the nodes which are currently selected in an browser independent way. It even allows to surround sub-selections in text nodes, to exactly represent the user's selection.
The code was created in the Mediabird project, a program that features social eLearning and flash-card based studying. The attached file is licensed under the GPLv3. If you need a different license, please contact the author.
The function getSelection takes four arguments:
-
context: The document object, either null if you want to use the default document or a particular document object which might refer to a document object of a different IFrame, window or frame.
-
disableSurrounding: Do not put SPAN nodes around text ranges to exaclty match the user's selection. Instead, only whole nodes are returned. Defaults to false.
-
returnNullIfEmpty: If true, the function will immediately return null if there is no selection, i.e. the selection is collapsed.
-
allowTextNodes: Normally, only element nodes are returned. If you specify true, also text nodes will be returned.
How does the algorithm work? It determines the last and first node of the current selection. If they are text nodes (and disableSurrounding is not set or false), they are split at the current range's outer boundaries.
In the next step, the algorithm walks up to a common ancestor level which contains both the start and end node tree and adds all siblings to the node list. Afterwards, it determines which nodes are to be returned and which not, according to allowTextNodes and disableSurrounding.
Download related source
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