I’m a teacher who’s very interested in technology. I’m planning on going to grad school for educational technology. I’ve been interested in and following the developments of decentralized networks/technology but definitely not treating it as a new hammer that I’m making everything into a nail to use on. I also don’t believe in using technology for tech’s sake, especially in education.
I used flashcards as part of my Chinese studies to great success, and now I use Quizlet to help my students review and store knowledge points. There are third party apps like Kahoot and Gimkit that can let you host a live competition using your cards. My students love it, but the import/export process is kind of annoying and can generate errors like lost information or mixed up cards.
I propose to make an Universal Flashcard Standard. I want the cards to be hosted on a cloud server (or the IPFS, here to ask advice about that) that would allow users to instantly access their cards on any platform without worry that the platform they are using will disappear along with their data. Data about answers guessed correctly and incorrectly could also be included to make seamless SRS(Spaced repetition Software) experiences across platforms. The time you spend using the flashcards in a game would update your use history such that those cards are presented to you less frequently in subsequent sessions. I’d prefer the IPFS than a cloud server account or even github account that someone owns, because developers might feel wary of joining the network if they feel they could be suddenly cut off from the data.
I believe this could unlock a lot of potential for innovation. When someone has a new game idea that uses flashcards, users could instantly try it out with their existing sets. New apps could also be developed for more convenient flashcard generation, and it would improve cross platform functionality.
The format of the data. I’d likely start with something that can easily use the data of the most popular current sites Quizlet and Anki. In my own experiments I’ve started using Json files and have successfully imported Quizlet files.
Cloud/IPFS hosting (what I could use your advice on!)
no one’s going to want to use this service if it costs money, even micropayments. From my understanding of IPFS, if the cards are used and adopted, they will become free to users, but someone will have to pay for an initial node to store files that haven’t been accessed yet. If we allowed media files only in the form of links, the files could be all text, and therefore very small. So the cots wouldn’t be so high. I’m not sure what the total data use would be so I’m not sure of the cost of running the server. I’m debating setting up my own server (Aliyun would be the best cause I’m in China, but might need help setting it up) or using cloudflare/pinata. I wish they had bitcoin payments so I could accept donations for the project and people could see the money was going righ to server upkeep, but it seems they don’t have the option.
Data sharing methods and data privacy issues. I’m thinking that cause all card sets on IPFS are publicly viewable by default. People can clone your decks and change their own version. If you want a private deck, you could first encrypt it before putting it on IPFS. I have some more ideas though about how people could make collaborative notes for shared decks that might complicate this.
Syncing issues. I think IPFS handles this pretty will with versioning? client side apps might need some kind of reviewing mode for handling unwanted discrepancies.
I’m still rather new to programming. I’m learning python and trying to test out some of my ideas already. In this simple text based flashcard program I wrote, I included an importer that converts Quizlet export files into the format I use.
To bootstrap adoption, I want to make a webcrawler app that takes all of the public decks currently on Quizlet and Ankiwebb, converts them to our universal format and puts them on IPFS. That way as soon as someone makes an app that uses our format, users instantly have access to all of their cards. As a new programmer I also could use some guidance on how to achieve this.
Current project (haven’t really started implementing any of these ideas yet) https://github.com/Jewcub/PythonFlashCards