I think McNab overstates in saying "we [connect...and synthesize] in our heads now when we are reading online." Maybe she's just more of an optimist than I am.

Critical analysis of information doesn't happen simply because you read online, as a visit to many political, religious, or health-issue sites will demonstrate. (In the same way, if in print I read The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and The Washington Times, I'm likely to encounter a certain congruence of viewpoints.)

Maybe one of the challenges for teachers (formal or informal) is to help people become aware of how they learn, how they organize information, prompting them to investigate how the information they encounter is organized.

Another challenge is that of resources -- the weblogg-ed link talked about signing up parents and reading tutors, blogging with the students, providing feedback, asking questions about what students read, and visiting the same sites to see if the student's description and understanding track with the information...

...which, if you use other words for "blogging" and "sites," describes a rich environment for learning to think in pretty much any paradigm.