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Lifelong learners need to be skilled in finding, filtering, collating, evaluating, collaborating, editing, analyzing and utilizing information from a multitude of sources. Instead we could prioritize "content construction". Textbooks are an important gateway - a starting point from which students can learn and then begin their exploration of information on any topic (although even on that point I feel we should encourage the "critical reading" of textbooks). However the days when students could responsibly rely on any textbook as a singular information source are gone. Also, the process of accessing, synthesizing and utilizing information is often as important as the product. The skills developed are an essential component of education and life today. We have access to an exponentially growing amount of information to process and apply. There are many excellent tools we can all use to help in constructing and organizing that content. Here's a short selection of some of the more popular ones. They can be used by individuals and also by students or teachers collaborating in groups.

In entry-level courses it's often a struggle to get students to see that the content has larger significance and intriguing aspects. In most science textbooks, for example, only well-established facts are presented, and they are supported by equally well-know research studies. Textbooks don't usually identify areas of inquiry where the questions have yet to be answered or the findings so far are controversial. And yet often, this is the content most likely to interest students. But can you expect beginning students to read original sources, like research studies? Could you expect them to answer test questions about those articles? A biology professor reports on his experience using research articles and asking test questions about them in an undergraduate course for students majoring in life sciences. Students were assigned a research article to read-the article was relevant to content being covered in class. It was posted on an accessible website. Sometimes the article was discussed during the lectures and sometimes it was the topic of a tutorial session (these were large classes that included tutorial sections). Either way the students had access to the articles before and during the assessment activity.

Johnston's title is an easy-to-update, "good-enough" product that didn't require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget.

The first, Booktype, is free and open-source. Once the platform is installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups, and track books through editing.

Readium, a project of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and supporters, is an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB publications. EPUB is the industry-standard open format for eBooks and digital publications. The latest version, EPUB 3, is based on Web Standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and the DOM. The overall aim of the Readium project is to ensure that open source software for handling EPUB 3 publications is readily available, to accelerate adoption of EPUB 3 as the universal, accessible, global digital publishing format. Readium is built on WebKit , the embeddable open source Web content engine.