I remember before when Google is not in existence, it's really hard to look even for simple information. But now, it's a different story. Your just one click away to almost every information that you were looking for. The challenge for the teachers are a bit hard, to think that you're competing with Google who knows almost everything about anything. I think that if there's anything that we can teach to others that's not on Google, that might be the unique things that every persons possessed. I'm referring to the knowledge that you gained through your experienced. You can teach that to anyone who's willing to learn. I'm sure that if you search to Google the experiences that i have, you may find something but your not gonna see everything.

I think there's much difference to find the answers before this computer / online age. Before we really need to see that book, or ask the person and put them in, piece by piece before arriving at an answer, but today, you can simply type a keyword / s, then Viola! The answer is right in front of you. This means that the data analysis process and the return journey, people are stronger now.

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I usually do research on Google for lots of trivia that I can tell my friends and family, then eventually they're impressed with what I'm saying.

-www.callcenterphilippines.org

I think that there are so much difference on finding answers from before to this computer/online age. Before, we need to really look it up on a book, or ask a person and put them piece by piece before arriving an answer, but today, you can just type in a certain keyword/s then viola! the answer is right in front of you. This means that the knowledge process and analysis of the people way back are stronger than now.

I agree this is a fundamental shift that educators are dealing with and forcing us to rethink a whole whack of current practice (not the least of which is assessment).

I really like the concept of an "outboard brain", coined by Cory Doctorow. He was speaking specifically about his blog being his outboard brain, but others have picked up and expanded on it to include the web and, increasingly, the devices we use to connect to the web. Clive Thompson at Wired wrote an interesting article about his outboard brain in an article he wrote in 2007 (Your Outboard Brain Knows All http://www.wired.com/techbiz/p.... The line he used that I like is "the line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second."

@Neil I agree with you completely--there are many aspects of cognition that we can't (and shouldn't) outsource to any machine. The challenge for us as scholars and educators is to leverage technology to do what it's good at thereby freeing up our cognitive bandwidth for the weightier matters you reference.

For awhile I've been wondering about the difference between factoids and discipline knowledge. It's easy to trot out the arguments against a pedagogy that involves merely the delivery of memorizable and repeatable chunks of information. While I'm strongly in favour of education being about 'thinking' not about information, I'm starting to question just how easily those two elements can be separated.

Right now I'm being impacted by Howard Gardner's Book "Five Minds for the Future", particularly the section on the Disciplined Mind. It's interesting that in his belief, some of the other 'minds' such as the Synthesizing Mind, require the background content that comes from being disciplined in a subject area. While I myself (like all of us) have countless examples of being able to "google something" to find a piece of info, that's a long way from understanding the appropriate and discipline-based habits of mind that make up clear and effect thinking on a given topic. Disciplined thinking, like Gardner's other minds (Synthesizing, Creative, Respectful and Ethical) can't be outsourced to Google..

I have been saying this for a few years now. It's so true that educators should focus more on helping students to think, process, and use information rather than be able to recall it. However, while it seems it's not necessary to memorize information anymore, I have to say that the only reason I know what someone is talking about when they discuss Lesotho is because I memorized world maps in college.

Agreed--there is a good deal of domain specific knowledge that an expert or practitioner should be able to recall and use at will. However, the amount of knowledge even within a domain (e.g., the drug interactions a doctor should know about) is massive enough that some reliance on Google-like machines for memory assistance is not only inevitable but desirable. This is even more true for the layperson who only occasionally has need to recall and use facts to complete a particular task.

"An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history--he is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired. Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do--which is probably the reason we have so few thinkers." -- Henry Ford

Even before the Internet and Google, good teaching hasn't been simply about dispensing information (since Gutenberg?). If we are to truly move forward in using technology to assist good teaching, we must first correctly define what good teaching is and isn't. We can't simply compare technology-aided teaching to bad teaching.

Love this post!

I've found that I've outsourced my memory to OneNote. : )

I wonder if the change over the years has anything to do with the amount of information we are presented each day. Are we bombarded with more "knowledge" than in the past? What makes us "smart" these days? How do we decide what is important enough to file in our mind as opposed to just knowing where to go to get it?

I've thought about this as I watch how my young son learns. Every day he asks questions we don't know the answer to. Right now they have to do with bugs. One question this week was "what's the fastest insect?" How incredibly cool it was to be able to find that answer out so quickly (it's dragonflies in case you're interested) and then start to dig deeper and make connections we probably couldn't in the past. In the past we probably would have forgotten about the question by the time we were at the place that had held the information. Because we had instant access to information we went on to identify the exact species of dragonfly he recently caught in his net. That led to a discussion on the fastest animal and then my daughter's interest was piqued and she asked about whether people were animals and it went on and on. With each question we could get text, oodles of pictures, video, etc and because we could do so instantly the discussion went on much longer. And this goes on quite frequently at our house. I have Google to thank for helping my daughter stop sucking her thumb.

I don't know for a fact if more is sticking in his brain than stuck in mine at his age. He certainly is presented more information than I ever was and seems to "know" more than I did. He recalls facts he's learned online. How that will change as he ages I can only imagine. Will he keep his brain in first place or will he put it in second, right behind Google? Will he be less smart for doing so?

Sorry for the lengthy comment!