That would be cool. Chains of cards is something I'm interested in--mostly for creating 'narratives' within decks (originally as part of output/dialogue practice), and I can see how some kind of plugin could work for extracting customized sets of cards for specific restudy purposes and then being able to manipulate them for whatever--microspacing and whathaveyou.
Reading about the Iversen Method and what I like about it made me think about why I prefer to think about focusing on Anki--not as a specific rigid/isolated definition of 'SRS', but as a software workshop custom designed around 'language learning', to help train 'working memory' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_mem...ecifically the 'executive function' (or am I also thinking of the 'episodic buffer' -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27...dic_buffer --who knows), though I don't religiously adhere to these models--by incorporating multiple types of information (gestural, visual, semantic, aural, grammatical, etc.) in harmony (in clusters/groups) from a variety of angles and increasing your ability to efficiently process the info, so that you can encode robustly what you're trying to memorize, optimizing what Supermemo calls 'retrievability' before proceeding on, via the spacing effect, to maintaining 'stability'. Plus it's something you can constantly change, because everything about self-study requires your continued awareness and input as part of this feedback loop. The SRS is just your study buddy, your virtually objective reference point, your 'heterophenomenological life partner', to repeat a bad pun I made (Daniel C. Dennett + Jay and Silent Bob).
Of course, you can change the focus of the cards on the 'meta' level too, shifting focus between listening (ex: going quickly through cards and having sounds/text overlap in the mind, or dictation and holding words in the mind before writing them out, improving ability to listen and parse at the same time despite aural interference), output (constructing dialogues, using call-and-response cards), grammar (developing intuition based on usage, using sentences based on grammar points and only grading those), vocabulary (associating them in sentences or w/ mnemonics, using pictures, etc), and so on, which goes back to the uses of keeping Anki porous, part of the overall environment, integrating it with other programs/plugins/non-SRS materials--but all those variations aside, I want to maintain focus on Anki as the launchpad, because it's persistent and long-term and thus eventually everything resonates with it, so why not start there when developing strategies to meet one's study goals.
At the moment I'm still catching up after months of no study, but I want to try and find some optimal mixture of all these ideas floating around soon. I have ideas for about 5-6 types of cards to be used in three phases. Hopefully by then cool plugins will have been released that continue to make me rethink the initial study process. I think as far as vocab is concerned, my primary focus will be on smoothing the process towards monolinguality using a variation of this Iversen method after the basic writing system readings are internalized.
Reading about the Iversen Method and what I like about it made me think about why I prefer to think about focusing on Anki--not as a specific rigid/isolated definition of 'SRS', but as a software workshop custom designed around 'language learning', to help train 'working memory' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_mem...ecifically the 'executive function' (or am I also thinking of the 'episodic buffer' -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27...dic_buffer --who knows), though I don't religiously adhere to these models--by incorporating multiple types of information (gestural, visual, semantic, aural, grammatical, etc.) in harmony (in clusters/groups) from a variety of angles and increasing your ability to efficiently process the info, so that you can encode robustly what you're trying to memorize, optimizing what Supermemo calls 'retrievability' before proceeding on, via the spacing effect, to maintaining 'stability'. Plus it's something you can constantly change, because everything about self-study requires your continued awareness and input as part of this feedback loop. The SRS is just your study buddy, your virtually objective reference point, your 'heterophenomenological life partner', to repeat a bad pun I made (Daniel C. Dennett + Jay and Silent Bob).
Of course, you can change the focus of the cards on the 'meta' level too, shifting focus between listening (ex: going quickly through cards and having sounds/text overlap in the mind, or dictation and holding words in the mind before writing them out, improving ability to listen and parse at the same time despite aural interference), output (constructing dialogues, using call-and-response cards), grammar (developing intuition based on usage, using sentences based on grammar points and only grading those), vocabulary (associating them in sentences or w/ mnemonics, using pictures, etc), and so on, which goes back to the uses of keeping Anki porous, part of the overall environment, integrating it with other programs/plugins/non-SRS materials--but all those variations aside, I want to maintain focus on Anki as the launchpad, because it's persistent and long-term and thus eventually everything resonates with it, so why not start there when developing strategies to meet one's study goals.
At the moment I'm still catching up after months of no study, but I want to try and find some optimal mixture of all these ideas floating around soon. I have ideas for about 5-6 types of cards to be used in three phases. Hopefully by then cool plugins will have been released that continue to make me rethink the initial study process. I think as far as vocab is concerned, my primary focus will be on smoothing the process towards monolinguality using a variation of this Iversen method after the basic writing system readings are internalized.
Edited: 2009-08-12, 2:13 pm