The very first non-navigation-bar text on the linked site says: "The Next Generation Spaced Repetition Tool to help you Retain More Knowledge: Create memory cards anywhere on the web", which should give some clues. A little lower down there's a link saying "Click here to check out our 5 minute introduction to spaced repetition", linking to ... a brief explanation of spaced repetition and why you might want to use it.
Anyway. The idea is that when you learn something, you are likely to forget it eventually, and that when you _remind_ yourself of something you've learned that postpones the likely forgetting by an amount of time that increases according to how long it was since you learned it. So if you want to learn something and retain it, you should keep reminding yourself just before you would have forgotten. Fortunately, it seems that for most of us the time we remember a thing for is somewhat longer than the time between reminders, which means that learning something this way doesn't take an unreasonable number of reminders before it's lodged in your brain long-term.
So: a spaced repetition system is a thing that helps you learn. You give it a bunch of things you want to learn; it tests you and remembers -- separately for each individual thing -- when you were last tested and how you did. If its algorithm matches your brain reasonably well, a fairly small investment of effort can help you get a lot of stuff imported lastingly into your brain.
The most common use of these things is for learning foreign language vocabulary, but of course that's by no means all you can do with them.
gjm11|5 years ago
Anyway. The idea is that when you learn something, you are likely to forget it eventually, and that when you _remind_ yourself of something you've learned that postpones the likely forgetting by an amount of time that increases according to how long it was since you learned it. So if you want to learn something and retain it, you should keep reminding yourself just before you would have forgotten. Fortunately, it seems that for most of us the time we remember a thing for is somewhat longer than the time between reminders, which means that learning something this way doesn't take an unreasonable number of reminders before it's lodged in your brain long-term.
So: a spaced repetition system is a thing that helps you learn. You give it a bunch of things you want to learn; it tests you and remembers -- separately for each individual thing -- when you were last tested and how you did. If its algorithm matches your brain reasonably well, a fairly small investment of effort can help you get a lot of stuff imported lastingly into your brain.
The most common use of these things is for learning foreign language vocabulary, but of course that's by no means all you can do with them.
systoll|5 years ago
A basic system is to review each card after 1,2,4,8,etc days, resetting if you don't recall the answer from the prompt.
RobertoG|5 years ago
Maybe you did and forgot about it :-)
max_|5 years ago