How I Turned My Classroom into a ‘Living Video Game’—and Saw Achievement Soar. The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown (Highlights from his "Entrepreneurial Learner" Keynote at DML2012) A Diagram Of 21st Century Pedagogy - The modern learner has to sift through a lot of information.
That means higher level thinking skills like analysis and evaluation are necessary just to reduce all the noise and establish the credibility of information. There is also the matter of utility. Evaluating information depends as much on context and circumstance as it does the nature of the data itself. The essay full of fluff may distill quite nicely down to a 140 character tweet. A trivial fact about governments may appear useless in a research paper on the 3 branches of government, but could find utility in a project-based learning artifact on the evolution of government systems worldwide.