In education research, three things have my attention: one-on-one tutoring, Zig Engelmannism, and spaced repetition.
Anki is a flash card program. Each card has a front and a back. When you are reviewing the cards, the program shows you the front (maybe it is a word in a foreign language or the symptoms for a disease) and you try to remember what is on the back (maybe it is the word in your language or the name of the disease). When you remember it, or give up trying to remember, you press a button and the program reveals the answer. You press another button to record whether you got it right or wrong, and the program shows you the next card to review.
Which cards does it show you each day? The program schedules them for you. When you tell that you got one wrong it plans for you to see it again soon. When you tell that you got one right, it plans for you to see it again later, maybe 10 minutes later if you last saw the card 5 minutes ago. After using it once the spacing is measured in days instead of minutes. After using it for a while the spacing is measured in months and years.
Where do these cards come from? There are many available for download, curated by language learners and med students and hobbyists. When Maria was a baby, while I had free time but my work and sleep were diminished, I tried out some trivia for fun: countries of the world, famous paintings. While it lasted I enjoyed it and it worked well, but I didn't keep it up.
A few years later I read an article about Anki by Michael Nielsen, and I realized I had been using it poorly. Before I was conceiving of someone compiling a table of information about a topic (columns in the table for the definition, the spelling, the pronunciation...), and then formatting the table into a "deck of flash cards," which Anki could help you memorize. Maybe this deck of cards could be shared online with others who wanted to learn the topic.
I learned from Nielsen's article a more effective procedure: create bespoke and personal cards, few or one at a time, that remind you of the latest things you've learned and want to keep hold of. Don't organize them and don't share them with anyone — it's hard to sum up the reasons why not.
Last year I was writing a hundred words a day about ancient history for Maria's reading lesson. I was sensitive about the pointlessness of it. My five-year-old didn't know how to read a map, dimly understood how many days in a year and how many lifetimes in a thousand years, and lived far away from the Tigris and Euphrates. It seemed likely she would retain no details and maybe no substance from the readings.
It didn't seem like wasted time as long as I liked preparing them and she cooperated in reading them. Still, could she get more out of it?
We started an Anki practice. For a year I've picked a tidbit from each reading, and made a card out of it.
Tyre had a reputation for being smelly, because of how the Phoenicians made {{c1::purple cloth}}
The first pharaoh to be buried in a pyramid was {{c1::Djoser}}
In the mountains close to the Indus River, ancient people were {{c1::mining lapis lazuli}}
The notation {{c1:...}} is Anki's way of making a cloze. I searched the web for an image to include on every card: a murex snail for Tyre, the step pyramid for Djoser, a pile of blue rocks for the mining operation.
As of November 2021 I've made about 400 cards. Eleven months ago, I had only made two dozen, and the program showed Maria three or four of them every day. Lately it shows her as many as thirty every day. She gets through them in not much more than 15 minutes. The 15 minutes are fun.
The inventor of spaced repetition software, Piotr Wozniak, wrote a long essay expressing a lot of pessimism about using the software with children. He marshals some evidence and also includes this anecdote:
I recall my mom's heroic efforts to make sure I could speak German as a kid. She would speak to me in German. She would send me to a German class in kindergarten, and in the primary school. She tried all tricks in the book. She gave up after some 8-9 years of trying in vain. I was roughly 12 years old! I never learned any German. All her efforts were to naught. Kids need to want to learn or they will learn little. Coercive learning is wasteful, may result in toxic memories, and may ultimately lead to a hate of learning
Those are reasons to be cautious. I was briefly incautious and tried to use Anki to help Maria learn not German but her "math facts." It was unpleasant for both of us and a waste of time. I dropped it pretty fast.
But showing her history this way is not unpleasant at all, just the opposite. At the start of each reading lesson, I read aloud what she read yesterday. Then she reads the new installment to me. The flash cards remind her of something we've read to each other. The experience of showing them to her on the couch is very much like reading a picture book on the couch. I'm optimistic that they're also educational.
What I suspect so far about Anki with children:
1. One new card a day is plenty.
2. Never tell that she got one wrong, just quietly press "again"
3. Put an image on every card.
4. Put the cloze at the end of the card: "Besides Tyre, another Phoenician city was {{c1::Carthage}}", not "Tyre and {{c1:Carthage}} were two Phoenician cities."
5. Be quick to drop any tiring or stressful card.
