Ed Young has written an interesting blog post on Discover magazine which looks at how our memory is adapting to technological change around us. In the learning environment, especially workplace learning, Google is one of the first choices when it comes to just in time learning so I thought this post would be worth highlighting.

Betsy Sparrow from Columbia University has researched the effect of Google on our ability to retain information. Her findings show that our increased reliance on technology for finding information means that we are less focussed on actually remebering the information. But, we are more focussed on where to find the information - increasingly, this is what we remember. If we know where to find it there is less need to remember it.

In the post, Ed Young argues that this is no different from how we use social networks to provide us with what we know ie we do not need to know everything, but we need to know the people who can help us.

Sparrow summarises here work: "We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.”

So, technology is making us better at remembering meta-data which reflects the way we remember who knows what in our social networks.

If you go and visit the post it is also worth looking at the comments - there is a great debate there.