I'm starting to reconsider reading & writing as prerequisite skills, at least in the form that they have been taught for the past 100 years. Will Richardson quotes Mary McNab here, which I think gives a flavour of what I'm mulling in my mind:

"…reading online requires synthesis of multiple perspectives and multiple information resources. We have to create our own narrative. And in a book the author creates a narrative for us and connects information and synthesizes through explanation. And we do that in our heads now when we are reading online."

"It [hypertext] changes the reading path. And the kinds of things that we do when we are reading hypertext are different from when we read a narrative print. And as a result, some students may encounter that it requires more mental energy to focus on creating a personal rhetorical structure while they are reading. It requires engagement in critical analysis of information."