Site construction by Mark Booth, nmb2 at tutor dot open dot ac dot uk
Page design based on work by Alessandro Fulciniti
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Flash cards are simply cards with one or more words on one side and another set of words on the back.
We use flash cards to help us learn things, like the translation of a word or phrase into another language, or perhaps a glossary of technical terms.
Start by looking at the front of the card and trying to remember what the back says. Then click Flip to check if you were right.
This will help you to develop your memory. Over time there will be some cards that you remember easily and others that give you trouble.
When you meet a word that is not easy to remember, click the Mark button and a mark will appear on the card to indicate that you have flagged it.
When you have gone through the whole deck, marking the cards that have given you trouble, press the button marked "Flagged cards only" and the progam will just test you on the ones that you had trouble with. When you want to go back to viewing the whole deck again, just press the "All cards" button.
You can flag and unflag cards by pressing the same button. When you have been through the flagged cards a few times, some of them will start to stick, so you can unflag them and carry on with the others.
Unfortunately, we won't remember the cards you marked after you leave the site, so you will need to start afresh each time. This is because we don't want to leave a clutter of cookies on your machine, or make you have to log on each time.
First of all use the drop down controls to select a set of cards to work with.
The cards are held in files on the web server, see below for building and submitting your own files of cards so that you can share them with other people
When the file is loaded the first card will appear. The card will show either the Spanish side first or the English side - you can alter this using the "radio buttons" under the file selection boxes.
Pressing Next or Prev will show you the next or previous card, with the selected side first. Click Flip to turn over the current card to show the other side.
You can use the Alt key together with the first letter of the button if you prefer using the keyboard - Alt-n for the next card, Alt-f to flip it, Alt-m to mark the card for further revision and Alt-p to go back a card.
The data for the cards is held in XML files that contain a root element and a set of c elements that each contain f and b elements.
The f and b elements contain CDATA text in UTF-8 format, which means that they can contain diacritical characters and simple HTML markup.
You could set up your own files using Notepad but be sure that you save the file in UTF-8 format or the browser will have trouble rendering it.
An additional XML file is held on the web site that provides an index of the files available - it just lists file/title pairs that give a name to a topic and the corresponding filename that contains the cards.
If you would like more details on the file formats, just get in touch.
If you have a set of cards that you have developed yourself, you can pinch my code and set up your own web site or you can just email me and I will load them to my site and change the index to point to them.
Large parts of the code and design of this program are "borrowed" from findings on the web. I have tried to retain the original details in comments or wherever, assuming a free license where not specifically forbidden.
Feel free to pinch any of this that you like the look of, but do retain the credit for the original authors.
The early beta testing of this code and the Spanish data were carried out by students of the Open University. Comments and contributions were received from Nigel Oliver, Yvonne "Eve" Knafler, Melanie "Mel" Ashworth-March and Jack Wilson amongst others (my apologies for not mentioning everyone by name).