ACA Explorers

Bottom post of the previous page:

It seems like it is easier to do this journal after I have finished my tasks for the day, but I was trying to do it once I finished submitting my anki study, I will have to consider ways to make this process more streamlined.

Marcus wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:01 pm It seems like it is easier to do this journal after I have finished my tasks for the day, but I was trying to do it once I finished submitting my anki study, I will have to consider ways to make this process more streamlined.

Always love to see posts from Marcus! Definitely always an enjoyable read guaranteed.

Imagine an app which very much COULD and WILL streamline this process!

Well until that happens I think I may just detail my progress from the previous day, as that will allow me to always have a post but be one day behind? It went pretty well yesterday though, I managed to get a good amount of stuff done in addition to reading and practice problems! Now an app would definitely be nice, will have to think more about how to get that implemented, just wish I knew more about programming and had less review/learning to do in the fields of molec bio and linear algebra.

Marcus wrote: ↑Mon Oct 25, 2021 8:09 pm Well until that happens I think I may just detail my progress from the previous day, as that will allow me to always have a post but be one day behind? It went pretty well yesterday though, I managed to get a good amount of stuff done in addition to reading and practice problems! Now an app would definitely be nice, will have to think more about how to get that implemented, just wish I knew more about programming and had less review/learning to do in the fields of molec bio and linear algebra.

Yeah that’s kind of what I do sometimes. Comment on the day or on yesterday if I haven’t recently.

Then again now with you and Marcela posting such interesting entries, makes me realize I need to do a better job with my own!

Just like I SUPER appreciate how detailed I get with my paid it forward/gratitude (because it becomes a super digestible /easy to read at a glance- diary of my life), I know I’ll appreciate just as much to look back on my i+1 diary here!

Re:Programming. I know right? Makes me think I should start legit learning it more. Hopefully Melissa and Sylvia get to the level where they can help us out! There’s actually a lot of interesting young learner app development stuff too. Once we work more on this robot we will have to check it out.

?: What are you learning about now with molecular bio?

Yesterday I did a good amount of reading, sometimes it gets a little tricky to keep concentrating after a while, especially if it gets too abstract. Right now I am going over some chapters on the various mechanisms involved in alternative gene splicing as well as molecular safety mechanisms that help ensure improperly coded proteins are not produced from malformed processed mRNA, but it is a surprisingly complex process that is taking me a long time to really get through. I am tempted to start going through chapters quickly marking key information and then making Anki cards to try and help with memorization and understanding of the concepts, but am not sure if that is the best way to go about things.

I am starting to finally feel a little better about getting the reading and practice in, it took a long time to get to a point where I can feel like I am doing at least a little progress every day, but at least I am getting there, bit by bit!

Marcus wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 10:54 pm. I am tempted to start going through chapters quickly marking key information and then making Anki cards to try and help with memorization and understanding of the concepts, but am not sure if that is the best way to go about things.

See I think this is a solid idea.

I’ve started adding cards from psychology books I am reading and it really helps me better intuitively understand things and then be able to process more. I’m kind of a whiz now at knowing what types of basic and close cards to add and how to add them with context so you learn peripherally as well.

Its surprising how a few weeks later you’ll have huge chunks of information memorized and internally incorporated. I almost feel foolish for reading all these books and not doing it. How much if information have I learned that I let fall prey to Don Olvido’s Forgetting Curve???

Teacher wrote: ↑Thu Oct 28, 2021 10:44 am

Marcus wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 10:54 pm. I am tempted to start going through chapters quickly marking key information and then making Anki cards to try and help with memorization and understanding of the concepts, but am not sure if that is the best way to go about things.

See I think this is a solid idea.

I’ve started adding cards from psychology books I am reading and it really helps me better intuitively understand things and then be able to process more. I’m kind of a whiz now at knowing what types of basic and close cards to add and how to add them with context so you learn peripherally as well.

Its surprising how a few weeks later you’ll have huge chunks of information memorized and internally incorporated. I almost feel foolish for reading all these books and not doing it. How much if information have I learned that I let fall prey to Don Olvido’s Forgetting Curve???

I am definitely starting to feel like it is better to just make the cards and then read the book that way, which also feels really weird to me because I would never normally read a book like that. On the other hand, normally I wouldn't want to memorize and internalize large chunks of a book. It is a shame that we can't just have college courses and other types of educational materials set up in this way, for I think it makes much more sense than the traditional means of storing information in textbooks. Would definitely feel like a better way to approach a subject if there was a lecture portion and then at home instead of just reading it was an interactive form of reading that covered the most important pieces of information and how they tie together, but unfortunately that just isn't always feasible.

Just to agree and comment on how different this feels - but how effective it is:

For the book Charisma Myth I have read maybe 50% and added likely 500 cards if not more. And I am going slow with the book but each day I review the cards I feel them integrating more and I start seeing them as examples playing out in real life situations.

I feel like i+1 input is legit. Take it slow. 99% old - 1% new. And so take time with the input to make sure you don’t move on until you are at least at 99%, whatever that might mean for you (comprehension only? Production ability as well? Advanced integration and synthesis ala the higher ‘levels’ in Benjamin Blooms Taxonomy of Knowledge? etc.).

And I also feel like the cards get better about this book as I continue. Almost like the development of the cards themselves shows a story of my continued improvement in understanding of the topic matter.

So really ensuring the setting ‘review new cards in order added’ would be recommended as anyone else reviewing this deck would take the same i+1 journey with me, likely much better than reviewing the new cards in a random order.

Like the lecture idea as well.

I am thinking of how we could have a contribution board.

Maybe a media board is best. Could submit anything to contribute to our pooled knowledge Explorers Encyclopedia ala the Foundations Encyclopedia. From personal connections to images to translations to audios to sentences to paragraphs of context and more.

Everything is seconded. Approved. Comments can be left and votes cast on each part of each entry.

Submit lectures. Don’t have to be perfect. Others could contribute. Wiki style and i+1 improvement.

I do like the Explorers Encyclopedia as a means of connecting information together, it is a different direction than what I had thought to go in. Having such a communally curated source does remind me of wikipedia, but this would be a little different since it isn't just text articles. What I was thinking of when I was talking about the issues with just reading a textbook is the fact that textbooks have to be extremely broad to be as applicable to as many people as possible. This is especially true with the more technically complex areas of study. For example, in the area of Molecular Biology, even the most basic sounding of processes can involve a myriad of steps that must be understood to truly grasp exactly what is occurring. On the other hand, Not everyone needs to know everything about everything that occurs in every part of every cell at every time during the development and lifetime of an organism. One thing that I think would be really cool gets back to gamifying knowledge. If we had a digital game representation of a highly detailed compendium of technical and scientific knowledge it would be rather difficult to navigate in much the same way that traditional textbooks can be difficult to navigate. One solution to such a problem would be to devise a system by which one could plot a course through the dungeon, so to speak. For example, if one wishes to investigate something like, for example, adult onset diabetes, one would need just a few pieces of information to start: What one already knows about the subjects and the endpoint one would need to reach in order to fully understand the specifics of diabetes. A quick query would reveal to the student that diabetes is a disease resulting from insensitivity to insulin that can lead to damage in the islet cells responsible for producing insulin. In this case our digital representation of knowledge is associated with a virtual world of interconnected areas, each of which focuses on specific topics and which may be traversed and interacted with to gain a better understanding of the topics themselves. Since the topics connect to one another in a logical manner we can create a map that would function in a way analogous to the table of contents of a textbook. The benefit to the digital approach over that of a textbook is that with the textbook the information is laid out in a linear fashion from front to back, with a fairly definite order defined within. In the case of a textbook a new student may end up going through the entire book when they really only need to go through 4 chapters, but with a digital world that has multiple paths one could take it would be intuitively possible for one to take the starting and ending point and then work backwards from the end point to determine which path to take by focusing on the topics that one must grasp in order to be able to comprehend the knowledge presented there. That is to say, since new discoveries in science and our understanding of the natural world builds upon previous discoveries, we can look to the prerequisites to understand the most complicated topics to determine what we would need to learn immediately before the end of the journey and so on, until one arrives at the point where the student currently is. As for yesterday, I did a good amount of study again, but did a little more molec bio than linear algebra, so I am going to try and aim for a more even balance today.