I was reading an article in Slate recently about Google (and the internet in general) and it's effect on our memories. This lead to some further reading on Transactive Memory in general (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactive_memory) which I found quite interesting.
One of the first things to come to mind is - should we account for this in the classroom? Are students likely to divide themselves into "the ones who learn math facts, and the ones who learn history facts", and if so, what can we do about it?
I'm guessing the effect may be mild for many students, but it may be more pronounced for students less inclined to learn in the first place?
I know in high school that I myself was consciously aware of having a lower motivation to learn/memorize things that I felt would always be easily referenced in a book. This was reinforced by me teachers failing to convey (probably due to their own lack of clear understanding on the matter) that adding many of these things to my LTM would better enable me to make use of available WM space for problem solving.
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