PLN ...the steps to active self directed learner

"Concord High School Graduates will be active self directed learners who
inquire creatively about their world, take risks and examine options as they
initiate actions and complete tasks." Above is part of the mission statement of the high school I teach at. It seems to me that PLN's (personal learning networks) certainly are or will be an important element of creating our future active self directed learners. I have been doing some thinking and reading about the idea of PLN's including a piece from The Fischbowl . In this piece the author discusses the incredible abundance of information we live in today and the impact of that abundance on today's learners and what is required of them. "Our students need to learn how to find, evaluate, organize, synthesize, remix and re-purpose information in order to understand and solve complex problems." I agree very much with changes required of today's learner and worry some about the idea of "repurposing" I see the incredible amount of cutting and pasting done by the students in my classes. One of the issues I am concerned about is the idea of intellectual property (though I sense this is somewhat becoming "old school"; my greater concerns are due to the fact that I often see kids do this (cutting and pasting) without ever processing the information. Many studnets cut and paste without ever reading. So my major concern here is how do we assure students are making sense of information and not simply processing it? I hope in my reading and my personal efforts in dealing with and shuffling through the huge amount of information I will develop skills that I can use to help students in this process.