Hi Guys,
I gave this talk a year ago at our language school in Xi’an on “Making the Most of Skritter”. I never did see it linked to from the Skritter blog, but I think it might be of interest to the larger community, so I’m throwing it out here on the forums.
Nice video! I especially like the drawings and your general explanation of the overall purpose of Skritter (and other spaced repetition vocabulary apps).
There are a couple of points you bring up that I don’t think are actually supported, though. For instance, starring a word just means it will be available in list of starred words. They won’t appear more often unless you specifically choose to study that list. The only way you can tell Skritter that you really want to study something more than we recommend is to deliberately rate the character/word lower that you normally do, which will lead to more and earlier repetitions.
Items don’t really interact the way you describe when it comes to scheduling either. It is true that they influence each other, particularly to avoid studying “siblings” or the same item from another direction too close to each other. However, there’s no function that schedules words closer to each other because of their similar pronunciations to highlight differences, as you say.
Still, this is a good introduction too Skritter and as I said, the opening explanation, including the drawings, is great. Kudos!
Edit: It seems you can achieve the starring effect you mention in advanced settings on iOS. That’s what I get for mostly using the web and Android! My bad.