Pinterest: The Active Learner's Utopia

When reading Chapter 4 of Carroll's book, I couldn’t help but to think about Pinterest when he mentions hypertext. For those who aren’t familiar with Pinterest, it’s a website that is made up of images that are all hyperlinks to websites. I’d consider this website to be a form of social media because it allows users to “pin” these images onto themed boards, and share these pins with other Pinterest users. You can organize your boards by categories and popular ones include: food, weddings, decorating, makeup, etc. This website is really just an enormous collection of hyperlinks, since all of the images are linked to outside websites that can enhance the user's experience. These types of websites allow users to access way more information that imaginable.

While reading the book and understanding that people online prefer scanning and surfing the web instead of sitting down and reading/processing information word by word, I realized how useful Pinterest is in terms of organization. You can search keywords and scan through many different images/topics at once and are able to click on the one that draws your attention. 

Pinterest is always my first resort to looking up recipes or “how to’s” online since it’s, what I know to be, the quickest was to get me to what I’m interested in finding. I believe that the different images/pins on Pinterest serve as the website’s headlines. On page 81 in Carroll’s book, there is a bulleted list of what well-written headlines will do. Many of these points are successfully done throughout Pinterest boards. Attracting the reader’s attention is done by providing images related to topics/websites of interest. Pinterest is unique because each topic/website is summarized and represented through the use of one image.

There are many ways to set up a website and put out information – chapter 7 goes into more detail on that topic by comparing blogging and journalism. I never realized just how many online sources are available to us when it comes to searching for information that interests our individual preferences. I think that my passion for photography and my hands-on learning preference make me more prone to using sites such as Pinterest when it comes to surfing the Internet for interesting information.