Originally Posted by Seltzer

Sorry, I didn't make it too clear in my post but I actually agree that the availability of information nowadays is motivating more people to learn - it's so easy to jump on Wiki and read about anything whether you're interested in ossuaries, Samuel Coleridge or blue-vein cheese.

I just think that the quality of learning (on the net) is often worse than say, from a book, because of the lack of urgency in memorising concepts/information. I'm not insinuating that people's memories are improving/deteriorating throughout the ages or that people are nowadays more lazy. I'm just saying that if all information is at your fingertips, there's not really a great urgency to remember what you read, provided that you remember enough to find that information in the future.

It probably sounds like some crackpot theory but I feel like I naturally put more effort into learning/remembering things that I know I can't just google and understand in two seconds, whether it's because the material is quite advanced (and I'm learning it from a book) or the nature of the application of the material precludes looking it up (i.e. no time to google a foreign word while you're conversing in that language).

Students might once have been required to rote-learn certain things like the colours of common ions in chemistry but I imagine there's less emphasis on that nowadays since these facts can simply be googled. I am wondering if material which is traditionally rote-learned will be entirely phased out in the future for this reason? That could arguably give students more time to spend on actual concepts which require learning and not just rote memorisation (knowledge). On the other hand, do we want people to have to consult some external source every time they're asked to recall a non-conceptual piece of information? I know this is a bit of an extreme view of things, but technology is only going to become more streamlined within our lives, and so this topic will become more interesting/relevant as time goes on.