Today's learners are very complex and very adaptive. They have grown up in a world that is full of technology that is ever changing and evolving, so I am going to stay with the technology theme and say today's learners are like small search engines. They are their own google. Students today will obtain important information or knowledge from a wide variety of learning experiences, whether they are informal or formal learning experiences. Then when they need some type of information, they will search back through their learning experiences to find the most relevant piece of knowledge or information to help them out. Search engines are similar in that they will search through thousands of websites that contain a vast amount of information and will present the user with the most relevant sites for their search.
The information that is retained within the learner and the search engines also in a constant state of change. Information that is regularly used and correct is kept and easily remembered, as with a search engine that information is presented first. While knowledge and information that is not used regularly or is not relevant to a situation, is harder to retain or forgotten by a learner. With a search engine this type of information is presented last or not at all. The learner's of today, like search engines, have "The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information..." and learner's, and to a smaller extent search engines, should also have "The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical"
Today's learners are similar to search engines because they both are able to look for new knowledge from a wide variety of sources and determine what is important and what is unimportant, then determine how to use it properly.
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