Do you use incremental reading to learn/study/etc.? I am currently trying to figure out my own IR 'philosophy' and make it work for my workflow but would like to hear from other people on how they go about it. I will be using Anki, so I guess my options are either Frank Raiser's Anki IR plugin or doing it manually.

Here's my thoughts, I haven't played too much with the IR plugin except to ensure it works. I intend to shift my focus to some new adaptations of it soon:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid141803 (Edit: The connection to the plugin being at the bottom of the page, which refers back to the comment linked here. ;p)

Short answer (well, shorter than reading all those comments ^_^): For non-Japanese subjects, I did graded cloze delete cards based on swaths of texts I excised while reading, then I shifted to ungraded cards sans cloze delete, and now I'm interested in retrieval ideas taken from research papers (Karpicke & Roediger; important for both the retrieval dynamic which I had a narrower view of before overhauling/updating it recently, as well as the timing/locations of extractions used for cards), interleaving of topics (see Metcalfe, et al. on the region of proximal learning), and as I mentioned on the linked page, what interests me about the IR plugin is the workflow aspect (but I'm also coming around to the per card culling aspects as I shift interest to dynamic cues and targets on cards as well as cards that encapsulate more self-contained content).

I've been trying out incremental reading for a month or two, so I'm still getting used to it and working out how best to use it, but I'm fast becoming a fan. I really like the freedom to be less organised or at least less linear, in study or reading with the feeling that the program keeps track. I've not been used to jumping from topic to topic so much, but I'm finding I like it. Especially for difficult material, jumping to another article to get background and then another and so on down the chain, won't necessarily fall into a muddled heap, provided I take a long-term approach. Also, piling all the articles, as long as they are electronic, into an SRS program is proving to be as decent a filing system as anything else.
I originally wanted to use Anki too, and tried out the Anki IR plugin quite a few months ago, but found it all too hard. In the end, going with Supermemo seemed simpler, even though Supermemo has as reputation for being (and is) anything but simple. I still think Anki is the best SRS, especially for Japanese, and wouldn't use anything else for that purpose, but Supermemo is very different, and, I think, largely designed for incremental reading.
I feel its a pity I'm not being more encouraging to the people trying to make it work in Anki, and in a few months or years it might be different, but I personally can't help with making plug-ins, and I'd rather do things the quickest way.

Some differences, as they relate to incremental reading..
In Anki
- the window you read in, you can't edit in and the editing window will only show you a few lines ? maybe fixed in later Anki?
- extracting text jumps you out of the text you are reading, and it's 2 whole clicks to get back. Sounds trivial but still annoying. Questions made from extracted text sometimes need to be rephrased or otherwise edited to be useful. I find it nice to be able to do this while doing later reviews without jumping between windows as much.
- When I first tried the IR plugin, importing html was sometimes quite messy. I don't know if this is still true.

In Supermemo
- easier to make lots of different cloze cards from one base card/extract.
- making cloze deletion cards from pictures is already built in in SM which is nice.
- SM also supposedly, in its latest version, has something called 'incremental video', but at least for now, life is too complicated already without trying to figure that out. But those who like their subs2SRS might find a use for it?
- In SM the facts sit in the tree structure they were created in and that gives them context, though you can move them if you like. Whether you move them or not, each fact is one click away from its parent article, which is really very useful. In Anki the facts are going to be ordered in the browser in the order you created them I guess. If you don't make them sequentially, and the idea is that you shouldn't have to, they will be all over the place. The tree structure makes it simple when you just want to work on a certain branch.
- when using incremental reading, the idea seems to be to pile in as much material as you like, and each session and do as much as you wish, with the program selecting the highest priority articles and questions, based on the priorities/forgetting index of each card. These can be changed for each card or group of cards as you go (or in mass) , and Sm will automatically defer all the stuff not reviewed, a way that you can customise., Now that I think of it, if you are going to do this stuff in Anki, get the 'forgetting index' plugin, then if you add a priority indicating tag to each question as you make it, you can still get something a bit similar. Still doesn't help though, with the problem of how to sort through piles of overdue cards. If you have to force yourself to just start as much as you can finish, it doesn't seem quite like incremental reading.
- Have to pay for the program, but if you use it regularly its probably worth the $50 or so. Makes you realise that Anki is worth paying for – hint for people who use Anki a lot.

What about doing it manually?

I only found the IR plugin to be slightly problematic with limited tinkering, but as I understand it, it's not a shared plugin because it's unfinished, so hopefully updates/feedback will polish it off soon and it will be officially shared. @rachels - If you've been messing with the IR plugin and found substantive concerns, I hope you share them with Frank Raiser via comments at the site or somesuch so they can fix them.

@nest0r Are you currently using the IR plugin?

Anki + Incremental Reading plugin + Open Educational Resources (also known as Open Course Ware), for example, this Psychology introduction course from Yale = EPIC LEARNING WIN!

If anyone is unclear about the concept of incremenetal reading- http://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

bucaran Wrote:What about doing it manually?

I'm not sure I quite sure I understand what you mean. If you mean manually cutting and pasting bits from articles into Anki, I think you'd be much better off using either SM or the anki plugin.. The plugin will definitely save you time. My main problem with it is that it doesn't yet go far enough, but as nest0r rightly pointed out, it's still in an early stage of development.
As far as work-flow goes a web-page by the plugin author http://frankraiser.de/drupal/comment/221#comment-221 gives some good ideas.
I would also add lot of tags (or special text) for categories of articles and perhaps for each individual article (as well as for whether a card is a question or a text/extract), so that when you come across isolated questions later you can trace them back to their source. Tags could also be helpful to distinguish different groups of cards that you wish to treat differently, whether with something like the forgetting index plug-in, or so you could also use Anki's selective study options on different groups of cards. It would be nice if some of that tagging could be automated, but to quote the plug-in author, “... I instead mark extracted (or newly created) cards that have a traditional question-answer style with a special tag. I haven't decided yet, whether I'll add any work on the tagging, because Damien has some radical changes planned to the whole tag-system, which will likely break every tag-related feature I add now.”

The next version of Anki, will have a lot of changes, it appears. Among them -
The new Groups feature might be useful for sorting different kinds of texts and reviewing them in different ways.
I believe Anki 2.0 will be a bit more flexible in allowing you to reschedule cards without destroying their review history - useful if you don't get all your reading done on time.

@nest0r
I'm not sure there is much I could helpfully suggest to the plug-in author. If I think of anything I will.
From looking at his web-pages http://frankraiser.de/drupal/comment/221#comment-221 it seems Frank Raiser is clearly aware of issues with html formatting. It's probably pretty good most of the time anyway, seemed possibly to be less problematic the second time I checked, and as a last resort, you could convert articles to plain text (depending on your material).
Other suggestions I'd like to make, like directly linking questions to their source text – I don't think Anki will support.
Problems with cloze deletion creation belong in Anki not the plugin (or they are dealt with in other plug-ins I'm not familiar with).
I think it would be helpful for incremental reading, and maybe for other purposes, if someone made a good plugin for intelligently and flexibly rescheduling overdue cards. But again if Anki is to change a lot – maybe that would be better done later.

@nestor I'm also curious to know, did you keep on using your IR deck? Did you read a lot of stuff and and manage to review when Anki told you to. The Supermemo help pages/introduction to Incremental reading (see link above) talks about 'handling of the unavoidable overflow of information'. This seems like a fairly central issue to me. I am wondering how you dealt with this or avoided it

I will give the IR plugin a more thorough look or just fall back to adding facts manually from books or articles I read. I may consider buying SM later on if my attempts fail miserably and virtualize Windows with the sole purpose of running SM.

This is the first time I've heard of IR

Maybe I can help explain pepper. I am totally new to this too, I just learned about it from reading this thread now - perhaps that will mean I can provide a cut down explanation.

Basically it seems you take an article and import it into supermemo. Then you read the article and find important bits of it that you think are related to what you want to remember. Then you make little keyword fact questions that the supermemo program quizzes you on. Do this for lots of articles = lots of knowledge?

Correct me if I'm wrong guys

There's this -
Learn Incremental Reading

Also
Importing wikipaedia articles into supermemo

Learn to use the tree of knowledge

and a few other youtube videos if you search.
For AnkiIR - the previous link and asking people who've used it is all I can think of
Sorry for the brevity of the answer.... maybe later.

I actually found IR a while ago via Supermemo precisely because I was trying to figure out how to incorporate my reading and SRSing (I had previously given up on being able to retain all the information I process in a given day), but I found their description/arrangement needlessly complex, so I just went with my style of extracting swaths of texts and clozing them, or summarizing texts in periodic sections and clozing or simply reading them without grading them (or both). I was pretty happy with that, but I'm always looking for ways to streamline, hence my interest in the IR plugin for Anki, and as I mentioned, the card dynamics is something I decided to look at again (so now there's actually the ability to periodically trim down cards, instant updates of URLs, and quick card creation). I haven't done more than tinker to ensure it worked, though, i.e. I haven't done any cards over a length of time with that plugin.

As for a description of IR, once I came back to the concept via that plugin, having discarded Supermemo's stuff as needlessly complex, I found Frank Raiser's posts at their site and also at the Anki group (Google group?) to be much more appealingly concise.

http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/m...78402201b9

nest0r Wrote:(so now there's actually the ability to periodically trim down cards, instant updates of URLs, and quick card creation)

The version I found doesn't extract automatically the urls nor the titles, where did you get those features from?

Sebastian Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:(so now there's actually the ability to periodically trim down cards, instant updates of URLs, and quick card creation)

The version I found doesn't extract automatically the urls nor the titles, where did you get those features from?

The version I grabbed let you copy a URL to your clipboard and hit a button or select something from the menu or something like that, and it automatically made a card of that site, downloading the text and images, etc.? I'm pretty sure it was Version: 0.2.2?

I thought you referred to this mod by Malkias M.:

Quote:Maiklas M.
View profile
More options Jul 7, 5:19 pm
Woot, I've succeeded in combining both my ideas: I have modified my
copy of the Incremental Reading plugin so that it automatically stores
and displays webpage source information associated with questions.

Unfortunately if there is any link to the modified plugin, I can't see it.

Having the plugin to fill automatically both url and page title would save me a lot of time.

Sebastian Wrote:I thought you referred to this mod by Malkias M.:

Quote:Maiklas M.
View profile
More options Jul 7, 5:19 pm
Woot, I've succeeded in combining both my ideas: I have modified my
copy of the Incremental Reading plugin so that it automatically stores
and displays webpage source information associated with questions.

Unfortunately if there is any link to the modified plugin, I can't see it.

Having the plugin to fill automatically both url and page title would save me a lot of time.

Yeah, I shot him an email a while ago asking if he could upload it. No conclusive answer though; he mentioned something about polishing it and went silent.

Maybe someone else has better luck.

Another post, in case someone out there wants to try the Supermemo option and feels later they weren't sufficiently warned....
Supermemo is needlessly complicated?
Embarrassing as it is to admit, it was not until my third return to the program, each separated by many months, that I worked out enough about it to use it. Probably I wasn't very persistent or motivated. Even now, after more than a month with it, I mostly know the commands I need to do what I feel I need it for, and the other 85% or so I might pick up later.
The program its notoriously unfriendly to beginners. It seems that even friends and colleagues of the guy who made it say things like "Piotr writes this software for himself, …..... The interface is just impossible”
quoted from this Wired Magazine article that relates some interesting history of SRS and Supermemo. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/maga...ntPage=all

Some other points/ warnings about Sm that I didn't have time put in my last post.
- it assumes you use Internet Explorer, so now I use two web browsers for different purposes. Not a big deal really.
- there is not good mobile support. Actually, the pocketPC version (? later windows mobile also), while not doing incremental reading, will synchronize with the PC and let you review your questions. The iphone version won't, something about software limitations, I read. The upcoming android version may be similar. So I don't expect to be reviewing on my phone any time soon, though I have enough Anki Japanese stuff to keep me busy there anyway.
- if you want to download a trial version that does incremental reading, sm2006 is available but seemed a bit temperamental and bug prone with formatting. The subsequent versions, in contrast, don't do that.
- User support unlikely to be as good as Anki
- there is an undo function for text editing, but not for other actions! I have to do frequent backups, but these are simple to do from within the program.
- if you can't find some of your menu items, try, in the menus - File, Level, and then choose one of the higher levels. Or - Ctrl Shift Alt F12, a few times, to cycle through levels.

A plugin or similar to add references in Anki would be great. Following the link nest0r gave, I noticed some comments by Damien Elmes saying he would think about features that might support this sort of stuff. That is beginning to sound encouraging. Maybe in the future I'll even switch back to Anki for IR. But for the moment there are things I want, that I can get from Supermemo that I can't get elsewhere, or not simply. The most important points for me are
1. The way you can store documents in a structured way, with your questions and srs all in one place is great. Have a look at the third video I mentioned to see what I mean. You could link cards in Anki to documents in another program, and it might be worth considering, but it would be more work.
2. The auto-postpone feature. I still want some way to push less important material to the back of the queue if I have become inundated with reading. And I want to do it without spending my time on deck maintenance like exporting, tagging, sorting, rescheduling. In my own past experience, I've noticed how it is so easy to spend time on study methods instead of the thing itself, and I hate that.

Wikipedia has a stub on incremental reading. The first post doesn't explain what it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading