We are all learners, and in the twenty-first century learners must navigate a swirling sea of information to make sense of the world. From the time the clock radio clicks on in the morning to the time the last text message is received for the night, we are flooded with stimuli• That ask us to pay attention (or give us a way to vegetate).• That invite us to distinguish the useful from the useless (or allow us to lose our- selves in the fog).• That call on us to create new products of our own (or encourage us to be passive consumers of others’ ideas).The stimuli come in all formats – print, visuals, music, talk, exhibits, and evenodors. They come through avenues as familiar as the daily newspaper and as exotic as the latest social-media site or “app.” The one characteristic the formats and avenues have in common is that they all provide some kind of information. Together, they offer a tsunami of facts, ideas, and opinions that we can access, evaluate, and use to build an understanding of the world and of ourselves – that is, to learn.The amount and range of information available to us today is unprecedented. Phrases like “the information revolution,” “the information (or knowledge) society,” “the knowledge economy,” and similar expressions underscore the truism that our society has been transformed by virtually instantaneous access to virtually unlim- ited stores of information. Thomas Friedman was among the first to tell us that the world is flat (2005, 2007) and that we must devise new political and economic understandings based on the ceaseless communication of information from all cor- ners of the world. Governments continue to tell us that information relating to national security is so time-sensitive that we must allow new kinds of surveillance to keep society safe. Teenage subscribers to social networks not only access infor- mation but enter text and video images and publish them widely – becoming the first adolescents in history to be creators as well as consumers of vast quantities of information.
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