Comment by hiAndrewQuinn

>Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium.

>Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday.

No, you genuinely can't. Your example shows exactly why. First, your whole time horizon is bounded within a single week; second, reviewing the same thing every day for 4 days in a row is horribly inefficient, as anyone who actually went through that in school is apt to remember. Your example is also bound to a single week, which means the average topic will be remembered for a month at most afterwards - that's not a good long term learning outcome at all. That adds up to 16 years where you walk out with 99% of everything you did just forgotten, and that's just pointless.

For proper long term retention of anything, we need something that not only lasts longer than a week, but that can persist across grades. A SQLite database can do this. I have a lot less faith in any human-meditated lesson plans doing this.

>So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?

I follow this process with my own family, but ideally one's teachers should take responsibility for teaching and making sure students continue to do their Anki reps. It's borderline negligent not to.

>Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.

Counterexamples abound to this. You are speaking to one.

Many, many students happen upon the life-changing magic of the humble flashcard, even without the force multiplier of a spaced repetition system. In middle school my class was required to use them for the first month of a foreign language, where we were expected to learn about 25 new words per day. After that, they were optional.

Nearly everyone who did well in the class continued to create and use these flashcards, because they simply worked much better than any other technique. This was a pattern which persisted all the way through high school. Of those who didn't, one cannot say it was because they had no experience with it - they simply chose not to invest the extra time and energy the flashcards required. But if this technique is so efficient, and its results so robust, then we should consider that an egregious misallocation of school time itself! And don't get me started on what could be possible with software-based spaced repetition flashcards, which are easier to make and much easier to time correctly.

>[W]ith learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?

My experience still suggests ebooks win hands down. The benefits are obvious. The real problem here is not the technology, but the distractibility of the students. Disconnect the device from the Internet during study hours, or hire an IT admin capable of maintaining a proper whitelist - whatever, but solve the real problem. Don't go back to the horse and buggy because people are too addicted to joyrides in the Fiat.