People regard flashcards as something trivial from their school days, so they don’t take writing them very seriously. But it’s awfully hard to write good prompts for a Spaced repetition memory system. For example, good prompts:
For more, see: Important attributes of good spaced repetition memory prompts
Unfortunately, it’s not obvious when the prompts you’ve written are bad, so people often don’t realize that their prompts are bad. This can cause them to underrate the performance or overrate the tedium of spaced repetition memory practice. More: To what extent do review sessions offer prompt-writing feedback?
One solution: The mnemonic medium may help scaffold prompt-writing through author-provided prompts
Even if one develops the skill to write good prompts, it’s quite time-consuming and cognitively taxing to do it. I believe that this is another significant barrier to widespread adoption.
One solution: The mnemonic medium supplies expert-authored prompts to remove the burden of prompt-writing. Or, maybe Using machine learning to generate good spaced repetition prompts from explanatory text.
Matuschak, A., & Nielsen, M. (2019, October). How can we develop transformative tools for thought? https://numinous.productions/ttft
Nielsen, M. (2018). Augmenting Long-term Memory. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics - Michael Nielsen
https://andymatuschak.org/prompts
Anki Practice Cards: Language, Music, Mathematics - Album on Imgur some examples and notes from Eric Siggy