<p>If you've been following the <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sciences/1355881-official-2013-usabo.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sciences/1355881-official-2013-usabo.html</a> thread, then you may have heard NSQ and I mention a flashcard program called Anki. For those of you who are unfamiliar, [url=<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0dI2VyLDWw%5Dthis%5B/url">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0dI2VyLDWw]this[/url</a>] series of videos from the developer provides the best introduction. Also check out [url=<a href="http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all%5Dthis%5B/url">http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all]this[/url</a>] article (especially the graph of the famous forgetting curve), which discusses Supermemo, the program on which Anki is based.</p>
<p>I've used Anki for the past two years or so to study everything from languages (I speak three and am learning my fourth) to math (memorizing identities and derivatives is so much easier). If people want, I can go further into these topics later, but for now I'm going to talk about using Anki for biology.</p>
<p>My bio class this year used the Campbell & Reece 8th edition book. Instead of reading and rereading the text, taking extensive notes, reading and rereading those notes, etc. I made a deck in Anki. The actual content of the deck is stripped straight from the glossary of C&R, which defines every word that is bolded in the text. Technically I got the words and definitions from the "key terms" section of the book's companion website, but that's just an electronic version of the printed glossary. </p>
<p>As for the format of the flashcards, I didn't do anything fancy. Word on the front, definition on the back, and vice-versa. The terms are tagged according to the chapter in which they first appear. If the same word is used in multiple chapters, then it is filed in the chapter that I read first (which, because of how my bio class was organized, isn't always the same order as the chapters in the book). </p>
<p>If the actual word is used in the definition, I replaced it with "this" or "these" placed in brackets. For example:</p>
<p>Front: Red
Back: Red is the color of fire trucks. </p>
<p>becomes:</p>
<p>Front: Red
Back: [This] is the color of fire trucks. </p>
<p>This ensures that the reverse fact is formatted correctly:</p>
<p>Front: [This] is the color of fire trucks.
Back: Red</p>
<p>It's kind of like cloze deletion. </p>
<p>Full disclosure, I haven't gone through the entire textbook yet (I've finished about 45 chapters), so the deck is still missing a few chapters including about half of the Diversity of Life chapters, most of the Plant Bio ones, two or three of the Animal A&P ones, and the last chapter on Conservation Ecology. I'll be adding these as I finish my own studies. </p>
<p>There are also some cards in the deck that aren't from C&R including labeled diagrams of the skeletal and muscle systems, and some cards on amino acids. They are tagged accordingly so you can choose to use them or not.</p>
<p>This is how I use the deck:
After reading and understanding a chapter from the book, I add the corresponding cards to the deck. I then review these cards, referring back to the text if I've forgotten anything or if something is unclear. </p>
<p>I think the easiest way to make my deck available to others would be to release it as a shared deck so you can download it through Anki. Since Anki 2.0 is about to be released, the "share deck" function of the website is currently down. I'll probably finish adding the rest of the chapters in the meantime, so that when I do release the deck to the public, it'll be complete.</p>
<p>Question, comments, responses?</p>