The Information Cycle
The creation of information is now largely in the hands of individuals. The growth of user-generated content prompted Time Magazine to declare the 2006 person of the year to be, well, you – the individual contributing to video sites, blogs, and wikis. While information creation has always been possible for individuals (such as providing a letter to the editor in a newspaper), the barriers are now significantly lower.
The packaging of information has been altered as well. While not everyone has aspirations of creating content, everyone has interest in organizing and packaging information. The use of news feed aggregators gives learners greater control in how they experience learning content. Services like iGoogle, Google News, tags, and numerous others, permit learners greater control over the type of content they encounter. Instead of content being pre-packaged, information can today be packaged according to the needs and interests of each individual learner. As a result, different skills are required of learners (Image 2). Making sense of fragmented information through networks of peer learners offers an indication of future learning tasks and even pedagogical models.