Human use of information is constant in daily activities. Pirolli extrapolated food foraging models to information: information foraging. The internet, social media, and emerging technologies have not only made information more abundant; they have made it more fragmented and complex. Conducting research on the online information interaction activities of individuals can be difficult as information environments co-evolve with the actions of individual agents. If the research project is too structured and intrusive, participants may begin to alter their activities in response to the researcher's activity. If the project is too open, researchers will have difficulty tracking participant activity in distributed settings.

Fortunately, with digital technologies, the trails and traces that individuals leave as they interact online can provide researchers with valuable insight. Open online courses (sometimes called MOOCs: massive open online courses) are situated between structured classrooms where the educator typically defines information structures and the open web where learners are self-directed without cohort goals and objectives. This presentation will provide an overview of how our relationship to information is changing, review a grounded theory analysis of sensemaking and wayfinding activity of learners in open online courses, and present the Sensemaking Wayfinding Information Model (SWIM) for how individuals deal with complex information.