Daily Creates: June 8th – June 14th
#tdc5151 Draw with Tiny Humans
This daily create tasked me with making art using tiny humans. I found this task to be fun because I am not very artistic, so this was much more enjoyable than drawing by hand. Recently I have been watching a lot of the world cup, so I chose to create a drawing of a soccer ball, which I think turned out well.
This task was interesting to think about with regards to course materials. I noticed that through the nature of the task, my extraneous cognitive load was reduced thanks to the coherence principle. The signaling principle was also addressed here, as the simplistic design of the site further helped reduce extraneous cognitive load.
#tdc5264 Web Rewind
This daily create had me use a website called Web Rewind to look through the past 30 years of the web and share what I found. I looked through a few different years as they appeared, but found these two years to be especially interesting. The year 2013 showed the creation of Vine and the creation of the six second attention span, while 1995 was the rapid expansion of public-use internet. I think that these were both transformative years, as the media we now consume is fully changed altered to capture our attention, and nearly everything can be accessed online.
This website is the perfect example of the segmenting principle to reduce intrinsic cognitive load. Having to understand 30 years of web history is overwhelming, and this website is able to fix this by splitting topics up. Furthermore, this website addresses extraneous cognitive load through the coherence principle, as it excludes irrelevant information and only includes the most important, transformative inventions.
#tdc5215 Your AI Slop Bores Me
For this daily create I was told to use the respective website to either ask questions to an AI or to roleplay as one. I tried roleplaying as an AI, but found that most of the requests I received were to prove I wasn’t an AI, which wasn’t all that interesting. I have shared an example of me requesting and image of a table and chair to an “ai” and what I received. I think that this website is quite interesting overall, as the use of AI is becoming more prevalent each day.
This task relates mostly to Mayer’s Principle of Coherence and Signaling. Although these requests were to humans, I think that the need to be descriptive, concise and accurate when talking to even AI models is important, as both can be overwhelmed with information quite easily. Furthermore, while completing this task I had to use the coherence principle to ensure my prompts were actionable, and the signaling principle to ensure the request was structured properly.
Reflection
From this week’s Daily Creates, I think it emphasized how often cognitive load theory is considered not only when creating things such as websites, but also subconsciously as humans when we come up with ideas. It is interesting that we instinctively try to reduce cognitive load for others, as we are aware of the difficulties that can occur if things are overly complicated.