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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I’m seeing this post a bit late, but I feel like I have to weigh in slightly, though it’s not my research area.

    Note that my information extends more to academic studying, don’t know if it’s quite as true for learning more physical skills.

    The main concept for learning is deeper learning. Which basically just means actually using your brain to think about the material. Things like connecting it to other ideas, pondering different implications, that sort of thing.

    The reason flashcards work is because you think about what questions you could ask about the material. The reason you write by hand vs type is because it’s slower and you have to think about what’s more important or how you’d summarise the information.

    I believe reading aloud typically works because it forces you to be slower and more deliberate, giving you time to actually process what you’re reading.

    That said what you’ve written is helpful and mostly correct, I’m just not so certain about the framing. It could mislead some people into just rewriting notes while reading them out, for example, which is inefficient and not very helpful for learning.

    A very easy-to-read source with practical tips:

    • Optimizing Learning in College by Putnam et al. (2016) (Look it up on Google scholar for a free pdf)

    Also as a final tip, my favourite exam prep technique: do a past paper without having looked at any notes or done any prep. Answer as much as you can just thinking about what you remember. Then go through with notes. It primes your brain for processing and storing the information.



  • Not OP, but I’ll answer from my own perspective. Note that Discord terminology can be a bit weird, since a server is just a unique shared group space, but hopefully makes sense.

    So you can:

    • Have private chats with one or multiple individuals.
    • Start audio or video calls through those chats, and screen share/stream in them.
    • I’ll also mention the ability to send not just text, but images, videos, embedded GIFs, files, so on.
    • in servers you get the same thing, broken into text and voice channels (the latter allowing the full range of audio, video, and screen share).
    • in servers each user can be given roles to determine which channels they can see and use, or edit, among various other permissions.
    • Pinned messages, @ mentions for roles.
    • Though I don’t use it much anymore, the option to effectively subscribe to a channel on another server to have messages from there propagate over (e.g.: a uni club server announces an event and you see it on another server in an events channel)
    • also servers don’t have any upper limits on members, at least not one I’ve ever seen hit
    • Bot integration via API.
    • oh, also it all works on desktop or mobile (because it’s mostly just a web app, but still)

    And key thing is: all very easy to get started with, whether you’re just wanting to join a server, or start an entire community.

    Big deal for my uses currently is voice chat and screen share in one place, while still being able to organise stuff into separate channels, pin messages in them, etc.

    I think right now if I had to replace it, assuming I could get the people I interact with off (which is either 20 or 1500 people, depending on how much I’d want to carry with me), it’d have to be a mix of Matrix/Stoat and probably Steam’s built-in features. Maybe a classic forum. That is, if I wanted to have all the features I use. I could do with less, but it’s frustrating.

    I think the alternatives will get there eventually, self-hosted even, but self-hosting also has a hardware cost.

    That said, I really don’t know why software stuff was ever moved on discord. My uses are gaming and university community-related.