The 5 bins: Bin One-‘Not-at-all’, Bin Two- ‘Hardly’, Bin Three - ‘So-So’, Bin Four - ‘Well’, Bin Five - ‘Prefect’ From the labels, one can understand that the purpose of each ‘bin’ is tag to the effort of any item to be recalled and to be place accordingly. The basic principle is that greatest recall effort will place that item in the first bin with a timing to re-expose to the viewer that item to be recalled in a very short interval and conversely, an item that is easily recalled, it’s interval to be re-exposed will be very long. The bins ‘in-between’ are for intervals of increasing length.
1.a Opencards
Of the open-source software applications that provide an environment for this kind of memorization, this writer has found Opencards to be very suitable (Download link). These points are to be considered:
Opencards is free of any adverts or other ‘lock-in’ techniques.
The use of PowerPoint files, gives a large range of options as each side can have sound files attached as well as photos, allowing for creative input.
It takes in PowerPoint files of the old format (.ppt) generated only by the PowerPoint application -- .ppt files generated from other applications other than PowerPoint appear not to work eg. LibreOffice.
Tips:
1. One can take full use of the PowerPoint environment which also allows the embedding of sound and video files. Should one include such a file eg. a sound file, then clicking the sound icon will cause PowerPoint to open to that ‘slide/card’ whereupon one clicks again on the same sound icon to get the sound file to play.
2. To set the pace of learning, go to the tab ‘Tools’→ ‘Long-Term Learning’ and set the ‘Maximal number of new items per day’ to a number appropriate for one’s own speed of learning. Some materials will be easier than others and hence, this setting can change accordingly.