App Idea: Support your personal learning with revision reminders

Being myself in the throes of re-learning Java, Maven and IntelliJ (don’t ask) I found this article resonated a lot with me…

http://archive.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/

In particular, this statement..  If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session.

This is 100% me.  I study, understand and then do nothing and all the good learning evaporates away.  I will come back to the topic much too late and have to start from scratch again.  I know I should set reminders and come back to material sooner but that never happens in practice.

Then it struck me that perhaps a simple app might assist here.  The pitch might go something like this..

“You know how when you’re self learning, you first forget to revise the material and then you forget the learnings? Well what we do is make it easy for you to post entries each time you learn a key concept and then play them back to you at exactly the right time to maximise your learning retention. In fact Research has shown that if you study, wait and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned.” It wouldn’t be a hard app to build.  

Capturing the learning entries and making it ‘easy’ would hard to get right, I thought maybe use a ‘share’ type functionality might work except you are sharing it with yourself.

The ‘exactly the right time’ thing is also challenging.  I thought maybe you could ask the user a question for each revision, something like “Too soon | Just Right | Too Late” to help train the replay algorithm to the users retention profile

There are also opportunities to do other cool stuff with the data like maybe you could ‘cram’ a particular topic by pulling together all of the entries for that topic.

Just a thought.

Michael