Andy Matuschak
patreon
Member preview: try Orbit in your own writing
🕑 Added 2021-01-13 17:32:42 +0000 UTCHello, all! I'm having a contemplative start to the year, working to shift up some of my systems and plans in response to the reflections in my 2020 wrap-up essay. I hope your 2021 is already offering you many interesting rabbit holes.
Now that Orbit is being used so prominently in How to write good prompts, I'm receiving a lot of requests from people interested in experimenting with it for their own writing. I'm intentionally opening the floodgates slowly—I've found that authors require a fair amount of support, and of course the platform is still quite raw—but I wanted to let any interested members give it a try.
Please don't share that link with others, but it's OK to publish any pages you make using Orbit. Please do let me know about your experiences as you try it out!
Relatedly, I'm looking for folks who are interested in using Orbit in the context of a course (either in an academic setting or not). I'd love to collaborate with an instructor on experiments around research questions like:
- Sure, mnemonic essays help people remember what they read, but what effect does it have on subsequent reading/learning experiences? Say someone reads an Orbit-enabled chapter 1. Can they then tackle more complexity in later chapters as a result? Learn later topics more rapidly? With less effort? More deeply? What factors in the medium seem most associated with these effects? Can those factors be amplified?
- What impact does the medium have on creativity and insight generation? A more concrete experiment: if someone learns a topic through the mnemonic medium, how do their subsequent essays / projects / term papers / theses differ? What factors in the medium seem most associated with these effects? Can those factors be amplified?
It will probably be easiest to explore these questions in a technical context, but I'm also interested in working with authors of serious non-technical content (like that prompt-writing guide) to better understand potential paths for the medium in those contexts.
Comments
Andy Matuschak
Hi there, Nafiz. Thanks for your interest. The documentation there is for authors who want to embed Orbit into publications, like in Quantum Country or in my "How to write smart prompts" essay. The functionality you're describing—using Orbit for your own notes—is not yet available. But hopefully will be within a few months!
Hi Andy, many thanks for letting us try orbit. I have couple of questions. I am trying to embed orbit prompts within my notes. 1. Currently, my notes are in a .html file which i am opening locally in my browser and computer is connected to internet. Does orbit automatically syncs the prompts if I add, delete or edit the prompts? 2. How does orbit handle the review sessions for multiple such html files on different topics? The prompts are intermingled or they are reviewed separately? Many thanks for all your work.
Keenan Payne
This is wonderful, I really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to try Orbit out.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I can't wait to try it out.
