Not only do today’s novices use technologies unavailable at the time their teachers were becoming masters, but the quantity and types of information students need to assess has also expanded exponentially. Part of this shift in learning brought about by today’s digital, networked information results from the fact that we now often work, share, and search at the data level as opposed the level of conclusions, narratives, catalogs, or indices. That is, students are not limited to browsing a card catalogue to find just those books that their college library had the resources to purchase and that were described with Library of Congress subject terms as addressing a particular topic and which a publishing house has selected for publication by an author who had created a narrative by sorting and synthesizing years’ worth of research into a comprehensible whole. They can use search and collaboration tools to get at the primary source data as well as a wider variety of studies of the data. By so doing, they can wade through and remove four levels of filters between themselves and the information.
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