Comment #⁨3⁩

In reply to Ricardo Gaviria Ricardo Gaviria

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:

  1. Cards that are created from existing content without changing it
  2. Cards that are created by writing content just in order to create the cards.

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