Explain the problem as you see it
Committing things to memory
Why is this a problem for you?
I store most of my study/research in Tana and would like to avoid having to copy that content to tools like Anki when I want to commit some of that research to memory.
8 Comments
This is one of two features that mean I till continue to maintain a LogSeq account. (The second is LaTeX support). With this added, I would migrate to Tana entirely.
I fully support this idea, in fact I know it can be implemented pretty elegantly on a TFT like Tana because it is possible in Roam.
In roam you can use this plugin (https://github.com/digitalmaster/roam-memo), it allows you to tag a note with #memo and then it will be added as a flashcard with the title of the node as the front of the flashcard and the contents inside the node as the information to review.
If we could have this in Tana it would be awesome, I would then be able to fully switch from Roam to Tana.
I must say that although this sounds like an interesting idea, I have my doubts about the roam research approach.
The most notable problem that I see is the usage of the nesting mechanism to structure flashcards.
The way I see it, there are 2 types of flashcards:
The broblem is this - the nesting model does not make any sense for any of the types.
For the first type, well, it cannot be created at all.
Lets say that you have an existing node, from which you want to create a flashcard.
If the content is not formated according to the nesting model, than you just can't make it into a flashcard without rewriting what you wrote, or creating new nodes that are formatted correctly. In both cases, you need to write new content just to make the flashcards, which means that the cards are of type 2.
So what if the node is formatted according to the nesting model? This would mean that you had to anticipate in advanced that what you wrote would someday become a flashcard, and you formatted it accordingly. And I say "formatted it acordingly" because nobody naturally writes according to the nesting model. So again, you fotmatted your text the way you did just so you can create a flashcard out of it, which again, means that it is of type 2.
I also want to add that I think that is a terrible idea to limit the way you format your ideas just because you might want to create in the future some flashcards related to what you write. You should write things in a way that expresses your ideas in the most accurate way, and I don't see why the way flashcards are formatted in the app should get in your way.
The reason I wrote all of this is because the underlying argument made by the nesting model advocated (and implicitely made here to") is that it is just "so simple" to create flashcards this way. You can just add a tag to you wxisting content, and you have a flashcard. But as I home I have shown, this problem is more complex.
So what about the 2nd type of flashcards? Why shouldn't you use the nesting model for them? Well, why should you? I don't see any reason why nesting nodes one under the other is more visually compelling than any of the alternatives.
It is more simple from a UI standpoint, as you don't really need to develop a new UI for flashcards, but, I think that you should choose the best solution for the users, not the laziest solution.
I do beleive that spaced repitition is an important feature, but I don't think that this is the solution.
In my opinion, flashcards should be completely seperated from the knowledge management aspect of the app, with different UI options and everything. And after this is done, you should find ways to reduse the time it takes to create flashcards out of existing content. For example, to allow a user to mark text and create a prompyt/answer from it.
Start from type 2 flashcards, and move towards type 1 in the future. I really don't see any way to do it the roam research way without suffering from significant drawbacks
Whilst we haven't shipped native spaced repetition as a feature, it's possible to build spaced repetition systems using new features of Tana Commands and Tana AI.
In this video, Stian builds a spaced repetition system with commands - https://youtu.be/TxIFSBmc0DU
It is hoped that AI can be used to automatically make anki.
Remnote is a note-taking software with anki as one of its core functions.
It would be nice to have a way to implement some type of space-repetition. Tana is much more powerful than RemNote and has a much cleaner way of implementing references than the reference/portal mess in RemNote. However, the SRS system is what keeps me in RemNote and that is a very useful tool. If you can do something similar (as well as an easy interface to create cards) plus some way to import the RemNote folder export, I would switch in a heartbeat.
I totally agree. Tana is a better tool. Beautiful, well-designed, few bugs and intelligent.
I started in Tana, but as SRS is a very important tool for my current needs, I'm moving (crying) to Remnote.
Not having a full app for mobile is also my second problem with Tana.