First, we just surf and browse ... yeah, there might be a semblance of a method to our madness googling and wikipeding, but there's not really a formal structure we leave behind ... nothing which can help someone else OR, morely likely, anything that can help US, ourselves, weeks/months/years later, when we need to re-trace our steps and repeat the googling, wikipeding to get back to where we were.
At some point, if we don't sink into oblivion, we DECIDE that we are going grow the fritz up and that we are going to grow up as we want to, not to please somebody else ...
As with formal education, we EVENTUALLY learn the importance of going a step beyond not sleeping and paying attention in class -- we eventually begin actually taking and using notes and that means re-factoring, improving and rewriting better notes to teach ourselves [and our future selves] as we study [and revisit topics later] ... AWESOME lists start to make sense for us, not just as lists of stuff to surf, but as study tools to fork and tailor to our own purposes.
Then we grow up a bit more, maybe we stumble once or twice, the grade gets steeper in the climb, we adapt our approach to climbing and we realize that more serious climbing is about climbing with others, we must help others ...
So we start CURATING our own forks of AWESOME lists ... sorting, stripping down list, eliminating the dead links, marketing bs and other lite chaff, collecting the sample of dots that we will look at much closer ... then we go the source, READ, review cross-refernces, visit the dev community journals, discussion forums and conferences, get a sense of the people involved in order to sift out the weightier dots worthy of digging into in more depth ... then we do things the hard way, we IMPLEMENT, test, break, refactor, extend, re-purpose, re-process the dots ... finally, we talk about our own trip through the dots, we ANNOTATE, explain, discuss, contribute, advance ... learning is a matter of attempting to connecting ALL of the dots ... not just the jargon and factoids but also the communities and people who driving the material.