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I am a former principal software engineer at a MAMAA company turned independent educational researcher. My primary interest is in deliberate practice and how to

I am a former principal software engineer at a MAMAA company turned independent educational researcher. My primary interest is in deliberate practice and how to use spaced repetition (i.e., Anki) to develop expertise. I have three primary areas that I am working on and would love to find serious collaborators: 1) I am building high-quality content for math, English language arts, chess, etc. (see [0] for a good explanation of what this looks like). This is primarily for my 2nd grade child, but I have also written hundreds of cards for high school level math, undergraduate level math, and programming languages. For example, I used this approach to build an Anki deck that decomposed the NNAT test (i.e., a gifted program test) into atomic chunks and then demonstrated how sample NNAT questions were composed of those primitives. 2) I am eventually looking to leverage this content and knowledge to build turn-key resources for others. This is surprisingly challenging for reasons I won’t touch on, but it could profoundly improve learning outcomes for many people. 3). I am pondering how to enable richer sharing and collaboration between people. I have a number of patents in this space and can envision a few business opportunities. ---- [0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

kampsduac 5y ago
At Quizlet, we are working on problems in this space. https://quizlet.com/features/how-quizlet-works https://quizlet.com/features/how-quizlet-works I'm an engineer on the step-by-step Explanations team - if interested in learning more, shoot me an email (scott @ quizlet.com) and we can chat! Maybe this violates the objective of the OP - but it sounds like we'd have fun collaborating. We'd just be getting paid by the same company to do so.
narcraft 5y ago
Have you already written about the challenges alluded to in item 2 of your post somewhere? I would love for these resources to exist and I'm curious about the obstacles you're facing.
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  I talk about this a little in an old reddit thread: > With StackOverflow/Wikipedia there's only one article/question/answer. With flashcards, people want to individualize their cards. As an example, for you as a foreign language learner, perhaps you want to include short clips from movies/youtube of someone saying a phrase like "Where is the library?", while someone else wants to use a clip of the same phrase from a podcast. The semantic content is the same, but the reification into a flashcard is not. You could possibly link to related cards like StackOverflow does in a sidebar... but I'm designing something that's more like concept learning. Each card is an Example of a Concept. The author can then move their Card/Example into what Concept they think it best fits - or create a new Concept if they can't find anything they like. Basically I'm building in the ability to group cards that have very similar content. By looking at all the various Examples/Cards, a person can choose what best suits their style - or make one for themselves by forking an existing card. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_web_port_of_anki/gxwrjue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_we...
- tdekken 5y ago
  No, not yet. In brief, some of the key challenges seem to be: 1) Each person's internal representation of knowledge differs (see [0]). Therefore it is difficult to take someone else's questions and answers and expect them to make much sense, be at the appropriate difficulty, or even be relevant. 2) The current unit of collaboration is an entire deck. This is far too coarse grained and impedes finding and adapting relevant material. In addition, it is a pain to later sync if there are updates. 3) The current unit of work is a single card. This has some advantages, but also makes it harder to make changes, see the forest for the trees, and think holistically about knowledge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)
pcthrowaway 5y ago
> MAMAA took me a second, but I guess it's Microsoft Apple Meta Amazon Alphabet now
- martincmartin 5y ago
  yep, exactly. When Facebook changed their name to Meta, people were looking for a good acronym for the biggest tech companies.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    It's kind of weird to use Alphabet in this context because people at Google seem to mostly still refer to it as Google, and the comp and hiring standards vary widely between the "other bets".
    - neltnerb 5y ago
      I mean, I imagine Facebook employees still call it facebook too? I like it, I hope it catches on. Right now I think it's just odd looking because it's unfamiliar.
  - vmception 5y ago
    NAAAM, a tour in NAAAM I need to get back on Blind to make my memes propagate
  - indigochill 5y ago
    Interesting that out of five corporations, only two letters are represented. Ok, "A" is ranked third in frequency in the English language, but the other one I avoided in these sentences? Not even in the top twelve.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      Freqency at the begining of words is likely to be different to frequency anywhere in the word. Regardless, "a" has the highest frequency in the company names, when spelled out in full (occurring 6 times, in 3 of the 5 corporations)
codingbuddy 5y ago
Hello! Would like to reach out but don't know Microsoft products well enough to guess what their fiery email domain is. Do you mean outlook?
- quartzic 5y ago
  Hotmail!
- tdekken 5y ago
  LOL, I suppose "fiery email domain" could mean outlook/exchange if we think in terms of reliability. I updated it to "Microsoft's not cold email domain acquired in 1997".
johnsimer 5y ago
Emailed you
dharmaturtle 5y ago
I'm trying to build GitHub for flashcards: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow Emailing you!

kampsduac 5y ago

At Quizlet, we are working on problems in this space. https://quizlet.com/features/how-quizlet-works https://quizlet.com/features/how-quizlet-works I'm an engineer on the step-by-step Explanations team - if interested in learning more, shoot me an email (scott @ quizlet.com) and we can chat! Maybe this violates the objective of the OP - but it sounds like we'd have fun collaborating. We'd just be getting paid by the same company to do so.

narcraft 5y ago

Have you already written about the challenges alluded to in item 2 of your post somewhere? I would love for these resources to exist and I'm curious about the obstacles you're facing.

dharmaturtle 5y ago
I talk about this a little in an old reddit thread: > With StackOverflow/Wikipedia there's only one article/question/answer. With flashcards, people want to individualize their cards. As an example, for you as a foreign language learner, perhaps you want to include short clips from movies/youtube of someone saying a phrase like "Where is the library?", while someone else wants to use a clip of the same phrase from a podcast. The semantic content is the same, but the reification into a flashcard is not. You could possibly link to related cards like StackOverflow does in a sidebar... but I'm designing something that's more like concept learning. Each card is an Example of a Concept. The author can then move their Card/Example into what Concept they think it best fits - or create a new Concept if they can't find anything they like. Basically I'm building in the ability to group cards that have very similar content. By looking at all the various Examples/Cards, a person can choose what best suits their style - or make one for themselves by forking an existing card. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_web_port_of_anki/gxwrjue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_we...
tdekken 5y ago
No, not yet. In brief, some of the key challenges seem to be: 1) Each person's internal representation of knowledge differs (see [0]). Therefore it is difficult to take someone else's questions and answers and expect them to make much sense, be at the appropriate difficulty, or even be relevant. 2) The current unit of collaboration is an entire deck. This is far too coarse grained and impedes finding and adapting relevant material. In addition, it is a pain to later sync if there are updates. 3) The current unit of work is a single card. This has some advantages, but also makes it harder to make changes, see the forest for the trees, and think holistically about knowledge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

pcthrowaway 5y ago

> MAMAA took me a second, but I guess it's Microsoft Apple Meta Amazon Alphabet now

martincmartin 5y ago
yep, exactly. When Facebook changed their name to Meta, people were looking for a good acronym for the biggest tech companies.
- tdeck 5y ago
  It's kind of weird to use Alphabet in this context because people at Google seem to mostly still refer to it as Google, and the comp and hiring standards vary widely between the "other bets".
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    I mean, I imagine Facebook employees still call it facebook too? I like it, I hope it catches on. Right now I think it's just odd looking because it's unfamiliar.
- vmception 5y ago
  NAAAM, a tour in NAAAM I need to get back on Blind to make my memes propagate
- indigochill 5y ago
  Interesting that out of five corporations, only two letters are represented. Ok, "A" is ranked third in frequency in the English language, but the other one I avoided in these sentences? Not even in the top twelve.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    Freqency at the begining of words is likely to be different to frequency anywhere in the word. Regardless, "a" has the highest frequency in the company names, when spelled out in full (occurring 6 times, in 3 of the 5 corporations)

codingbuddy 5y ago

Hello! Would like to reach out but don't know Microsoft products well enough to guess what their fiery email domain is. Do you mean outlook?

quartzic 5y ago
Hotmail!
tdekken 5y ago
LOL, I suppose "fiery email domain" could mean outlook/exchange if we think in terms of reliability. I updated it to "Microsoft's not cold email domain acquired in 1997".

johnsimer 5y ago

Emailed you

dharmaturtle 5y ago

I'm trying to build GitHub for flashcards: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow Emailing you!