Scientific American down on memorization

If you have read my posts on Open Information Environments, you know that I think that we should no longer be teaching (or expecting) our students to memorize things. With all of us carrying around smartphones or tablets that allow us to look up anything anytime pretty much anywhere, our brains are free to be used for something other than fact retention. What I hope to teach my students is to use their brains to find and filter information needed to solve problems.

A couple of relatively recent articles in Scientific American provide a similar perspective on information:

Scientific American “Smartphones Mean You Will No Longer Have to Memorize Facts”

Scientific American “The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for Our Memories”

I find the study that shows that people behaviorally and subconsciously shift their priorities when they believe that a computer is storing trivial information for them to be particularly interesting… this suggests that a classroom that does not require memorization is more likely to open up space for other mental tasks.