If you enable Document Cards today, you may see some of those cards the next day. I got one in my queue today (but the layout was messed up due to sticky headers) and I am quite convinced that they havenât worked on it recently. In short, I think it is more like (conceptually) a âreveal all hide oneâ type cloze, and the cloze here is a Rem. Here is a screenshot I got from discord
I like the intention here - to provide better contextual clue and sequential order (assuming it works), but I donât know how effective it is to show rest of the rems in the document. Also, not sure if these are âadditionalâ cards on top of the normal cards, in that case this will increase the review load. I guess to use these, one has to make concepts into Documents, which doesnât feel like the right way to organize notes. Above all, I donât think it works reliably. So I think Document Cards is something that can be improved serve this purpose. Thanks for bringing this up @UMNiK
The feature I want to request is a way to study your Rem in chronological order rather than random order. This could help a lot when your trying to understand the information in your first attempt. I currently go through my Rem questions manually on a paper on the first attempt, then I study them in random order.
Use case: I use RemNote as a study tool in university. When Iâm done summarizing a lecture Iâll test myself with the cards I created.
My problem: When I study a document, the flashcards appear in a random order. But the concepts in a lecture all build on top of each other. So when practicing concepts in the queue and Iâm shown a flashcard concerning some concept that appeared in the middle or at the end of the lecture, then I wonât be able to answer it since I havenât fully grasped and learned the concepts that came before it yet as they all build on top of each other.
Requested solution: Provide a possibility to practice flashcards as they are ordered in a document. This way Iâll be able to learn each concept one after the other, in the order they are intended to be learned.
For temporary purposes, you can disable all three clustering from the Queue settings and go to the document you are interested and study all the rems in it without spaced repetition. This is not perfect, but close enough. But to actually internalize stuff we need this implemented into the SRS system
As a workaround you might use the Active Recall Custom CSS (What is Custom CSS and how do I use it?).
You can try to remember stuff directly in your document and optionally after you finished practicing use the âPractice all cards in the Documentâ thing and just click Solid everywhere to record the practice session.
Congrats for you thorough explanation. But I disagree with your desire of reviewing all the descriptor of a concept together. This idea goes against the principles o Spaced Repetition.
Going back to Piotr Wozniak (creator of SuperMemo in the 1980s) https://www.supermemo.com/pt-br/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules, you must stick to the minimum information principle. Each âslotâ of information must have its own schedule. Otherwise, if you forgot 1 of 6 descriptors, will you have to drastically reduce the intervals of all of the 6 descriptors? That would not make sense.
Using Anki for a long time, I can assure you its even good to see these things separately. You will always be reactivating those related synapsis. And to have I full picture of the subjetc, RemNote has the great advantage that you can anytime open a new window and search for the original document (here is a drawback of RemNote - not having a button on the queue to directly opening the document in the rem that is being asked in the card, forcing us to open a new window and make a search).
But you can believe spaced repetition. It does not go against seing the big picture. Instead, it warns you when you should do this. When making a flashcard of one descriptor you fell you are not sure of the answer of another descriptor, you MUST solve this uncertainty immediately. Recalling randomically, with less context being supplied, is the key for enforcing your memory and truly mastering the content.
I prefer to think of RemNote as I very good tool to apply SR without losing the big picture. But messing the spaced repetition in not an option, at least as I can see.
The recommended implementation (through Powerup) is not going to change any default behavior. It is going to be an additional feature that gives user the flexibility to decide at what level of granularity the randomization should happen. So it is essentially âif you donât like, donât use itâ feature.
Having said that, here are my thoughts on some of the points you mentioned.
The essence of minimum information principle is to create prompts
that are simple, precise and consistent
that you should be able to answer correctly almost all the time
that should light the same bulbs every time you review them
The easiest way to violate minimum information principle is by creating a prompt has more than one thing in it. However, in a rem cluster, we are reviewing only one prompt at a time. As long as the prompts inside a cluster do not violate minimum information principle there is no issue here. A cluster just means that the learner wants to think at a slightly higher level of abstraction. Only one issue here is the cost of forgetting a cluster. This cost is not same as cost of forgetting a complex item that Piotr talks about. It is because members in a cluster are not complex to begin with and members have their own schedule. I will explain in detail towards the end.
Also, letâs not confuse Spaced Repetition with flash cards. The benefit of SRS comes from spacing and repetition. You can apply SRS at any level. One popular example is Ali Abdaalâs Retrospective Revision Timetable in which he applied SRS at chapter level. Flashcards implement SRS. e.g. Anki is a software that implements SRS at flashcard level, but RemNote is way more than just a flashcard software. In its true essence SRS only deals with scheduling (i.e. intervals) of the units of knowledge it is dealing with. The size of the fundamental unit is up to the learner. It can be a flashcard or a small cluster or something even bigger. I even say that SRS applied at flashcard level (and the typical Anki style flashcard reviews) is prevalent because initial tools like Anki and SuperMemo popularized that idea. Even RemNote borrowed that idea and innovated it by adding hierarchical context to the cards (which is great). But ultimately it is similar to how people kept innovating Internal Combustion engines for centuries. RemNote can do more than just imitating Anki. With outliner capability, the new graph feature and all other great features, RemNote can change the way we learn.
I have suggested a solution for this at the bottom of the request, under What if I forget one card from a cluster?. The funny thing is, the idea of a cluster already exists in some sense, even in Anki, it is called a List. A list schedules a small group prompts together and in sequential order. So the worst case penalty is same as forgetting a list. But we can come up with better algorithms to deal with this. One such case I mentioned is, if I forget a member from the cluster, that member is considered forgotten and gets kicked out (temporarily) of the cluster. Now to schedule reviews for this forgotten card, we can take into account the next repetition interval of the cluster and plan the relearning phase of this forgotten card in such a way that one of the forgotten cardâs reviews aligns with the next review of the cluster. So when the user reviews the cluster next time, the forgotten card will also become part of the cluster review. If the forgotten card gets answered correctly, then from that point onwards we can schedule the forgotten card along with the cluster. So the cluster idea gives the user a chance to test if the forgotten card can actually get back to its original schedule, thereby actually reducing the number of future reviews of the forgotten card. This idea can be applied even to lists to actually reduce the penalty of forgetting lists, especially when we forget just one or two members of the list. This is just rough idea, there can be corner cases to this and this will make scheduling complicated from the tool implementation standpoint.
While I agree with the fact that random recall will put more intellectual load on the memory and potentially result is better enforcement, only downside is the practical aspect of it. For example, if I am seeing a card after 6 months, it will be hard to just sit there and think about all its sibling cards. All I want to do at that point is to answer the card, complete the review and get on with life.
The bottom line is, everyone learns differently. Above all, this is just an optional feature.
Am I just unlucky or are clusters already a thing? For example I get the descriptors of a parent in groups and all the clozes as well. I even turned off all cluster settings yet I still experience this issue
As you probably know, there has always been some level of ordering by default. I think the ordering depends on how many cards are there in the queue, what are the card types, in what learning phase those cards are in and also what is the state of Cluster settings (these are just my observations). If you have just descriptors and those cards are new, there is a good chance that you will get them in sequential order
Do you think you can connects this to SM2 Algorithm? Or maybe simple ones like adding a reminder of one day, one week or one month automatically after review?
Or maybe a button. After reviewing the note, showing a button so there wonât be any need to ##learned.
Hello, guys! Iâve been using Remnote for about 3 months now, and one thing that would improve my experience with the app, and hopefully others too, would be the option to practice the flashcards in the descending order that they appear on the documents. That would allow us to create a solid line of thought and get a better grasp at the topics in an organized manner, especially if itâs the first time we are visiting that subject.
Yes, Iâve tried using rem clusters, but it doesnât seem to work properly, since I still see a lot of randomness on my queue. And thanks, I already upvoted that feature request.
I personally wouldnât really recommend doing flashcards in order though or at least not every time. Sure itâs much easier and faster but as research shows you remember things the longest when you struggled recalling that information and randomness is one way to make it more difficult for yourself. Ordered flashcards also get predictable in my experience. Before a recent update where you mostly encountered flashcards in order, it often happened to me that I was able to predict the answer to a card because of the last card I saw, which I found pretty annoying.
Active Recall
