I haven’t written any post in the last few months as I have been focusing on studying for my CCNA exam. I thought I’d write a short post on memorising techniques.
As I get nearer to the exam date I was slightly concerned if I would remember everything I had learned as I tend to have difficulty memorizing and tend to be forgetful. But I noticed that I have been using some techniques without really being aware that I was using them.
I found this useful video: (You're Not Forgetful: My System for Memorising Everything). One of things mentioned is that we are supposed to store what we understand or what helps us understand, That’s quite important and is mentioned in this post about formulating knowledge: (https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge).
But the more important point made in the video is getting information from different sources likes books and videos because this creates new, unique cues and makes it easier to recall these memories later because they are in different contexts. For example I wanted to memorise IEEE standards for cabling, I found it easier to remember these after looking at a chart in a book or wikipedia because I could visualise the chart. This then helped when I was doing flash cards and I had to recall this information.
Other techniques I am using are spaced repetition and mnemonics.
Mnemonics are very useful for remembering lists. Some examples that you will typically need for Cisco certifications are remembering the order of the OSI model layers (All People Seem to Need Data Processing) and Syslog severity levels (Every Awesome Cisco Engineer Will Need Ice-cream Daily).
For spaced repetition I use the very popular tool Anki. This takes care of scheduling revisions based on your performance answering cards. I normally stick to cloze deletion type cards because they are simple to create. You can read more about effective learning in the article I mentioned above about formulating knowledge.
Hopefully I will do well on my exam and in a future post I’ll share some resources that I used.