People interested in web design are always trying to think of the next big way to draw in users to view their website. They have to consider what people are drawn to, what would interest a large population, why read their website rather than anyone elses? My freshman year of UCLA I thought I wanted to be a psychology major and focus on working for an advertising company some day. Adversting sounded like the perfect job for me out of college because I liked studying why people do what they do? What makes people more attracted to a certain clothing website? Why do people prefer Coke to Pepsi? Is it because Coke chose the simplicity of red and white as their brand colors?
What Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter did was sometime very radical in the web design world by making the website more hands on and interactive. The person viewing the site must stay focused and alert when reading the site because it is presented with large texts, different colors, and visuals to keep the viewer entertained. The new author of, “How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens”, Benedict Carey says, “The brain wants variation.” The website is formatted from another website called “Big” which allows people to make creative presentations. (http://www.macwright.org/big/) There are many slides that are inconsequential. What I mean by this is that there are slides that are there as enforcers to make things more interesting and fun. By doing this McConchie and Schechter push a user along to stay engaged and continue learning about web mapping.
I have learned a lot about web mapping tonight from McConchie and Schechter’s presentation of the “Anatogy of Web Mapping.” Web mapping is different from a digital or analog map. Web maps are a kind of digital map that are viewed in a browser. Mapquest was the first to use this kind of web service in 1996, but in 2005 Google Maps made tiles faster to load, scroll, and zoom. A map is a composite of these tiles. Each zoom level on a map has its own set of tiles. For example, if the zoom level is 0 and there is one tile of the whole world. With each zoom level the tile number increases. Zoom level 1 has 4 tiles with a closer image of world spread out on those 4 tiles. Tiles are usually rendered in adcanced and store in a cache so no one has to recreate a map.
I love this kind of presentation. It forces users to reiterate what they just learned with an interactive visual. Carey says that embedding information in one’s memory in two contexts makes the memory stronger. For example, McConchie and Schechter explained what Raster tiles are in text format as the map’s base layer. Layers such as markers are then put on top of the map. They are categorized as data, content, feature, or vector layers. Once I read this I said it my head, “Okay, but what does that look like?” When I continued, the next sides answered my questions. They had an image of a map and everytime I clicked my arrow to the next slide, the map was edited with layers and described what each kind of layer would physically look like. I also really like the layout of the slideshow. By being instructional and personal the presentation reminded me of flashcards to a larger more interactive degree. There is a website/app I use to make flashcards called, StudyBlue, which is similar to this site. It also takes up the whole screen so users are compelled to look only at the large texts in front of them.
This got me thinking about study strategies. I’m constantly racking my brain to find easier ways to learn rather than to just read and use flashcards. Who doesn’t want to be able to retain knowledge better and faster? With all this new technology individuals are constantly coming up with new ways to answer this question. I think this way of learner is a great way to help people absorb information better. A lot of the time people take notes on paragraphs after paragraphs of a textbook and then never look at those notes again. How well can anyone say that information was obtained? New ways of studying and obtaining information makes people have more time to do other things like….solve world hunger. By making things more interactive and engaging this can help students of all ages learn and make studying more sophisticated and valuable.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/better-ways-to-learn/?_r=0
http://maptime.io/anatomy-of-a-web-map/#0