The flippant attitude that people have towards map-reading today is appalling. Maybe its the eagle scout in me but how can someone NOT want to learn to read a map? It isn't even that hard! What happens if your device fails you?
I think that incident was what made me realize that map reading was a skill that actually needed to be learned.
But secret: I have the absolute WORST sense of direction. I have no internal sense of orientation or distance. Seriously I get lost if I turn left out of the corner store instead of right. I can read a map with a compass and straight-edge and find where I am based on triangulation. But once I actually have to make realtime decisions using little more than a map I get anxious and frustrated, I usually just give up and look for landmarks or one-way streets that I can find and follow. Or hope that my phone's terrible compass and navigation-hostile map programs work. (Can we talk about map apps not even showing street names or one-way directions without having to pan and zoom all over the map?)
Even if you know how to read a map, they're just not a very good UX for finding where you are and making minor course-corrections in realtime.
The only real major advantage that gps systems have over the list method is that they can tell you when you're near an exit. Back in the early 00s I was driving to New Orleans from Dallas on a particularly foggy night and I missed the same exit 3 times because I could barely make out the exit signs.
Not an Eagle Scout, and have mixed feeling on scouting as an org at this point, but I'm very grateful to have learned how to read maps properly.
How about planning a route from contour plots?
Or maybe figure out which direction you should go without a digital compass?
I'm not trying to be obtuse, I genuinely don't see how it is difficult to read a map.
Well, you have provided a neat definition of map reading. :)
I guess your mention of representation of elevation made me realize that you at least need to learn the conventions and the key to a map.
Imagine how easy recursion is to grok for most of us and absurdly painful for most people trying to learn programming.
I believe it is a valuable skill to maintain or develop. Kids most obviously develop it now through games like Minecraft, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a correlation between navigational skills and general memory ability.
A lot of people were having trouble with it because we're all used to "turn left here" instead of the top-view get-your-bearings go-that-way approach to a map.