Society has used Web 2.0 to pivot to active creation and co-creation being the main mode rather than passive consumption. Formal and informal education can adoption this transformation by focusing on active knowledge making rather than top-down, direct transfer of knowledge.

We posit that a richer knowledge framework is constructed in the learner’s mind when they actively construct artifacts of the learning rather than simply absorb the instruction and try to access their long-term memory to reproduce the knowledge in a standardized test.

Many worry, however, that the practice of committing facts to memory is fading in humans as Web 2.0 makes knowledge so ubiquitous, and that this loss will set our species back whenever our devices fail or technology becomes so commoditized as to be inaccessible to most of humanities.

I believe there are real dangers to account for in this worry, but I also believe the devaluing of long-term memory as the primary means of demonstrating knowledge is not a problem at all in and of itself.

This is not the first moment in history when we confronted a new technology and worried it would ruin our minds. Plato represented the argument against writing in Phaedrus, holding that writing is the enemy of knowledge, the memory thief (as quoted by Farnham Street Blog, link below):

“They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

https://fs.blog/2013/02/an-old-argument-against-writing/

Forgetting is not a “failure of memory”, it is an essential practice of a healthy brain. We must exert effort to avoid forgetting, but that takes valuable energy, so it is important for us to conserve that energy for things that we unconsciously or consciously deem vital to our well-being. The retroactive interference from all those non-essential memories would block acquisition of new knowledge, or even accessing of important stored knowledge. (Dr. Arthur Kohn, link below).

https://learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1400/brain-science-overcoming-the-forgetting-curve

Active knowledge making does require memory, such as the ability to call upon resources that have been valuable in the past for particular creative efforts. The works of Plato and Dr. Kohn fed me in making this post, as one example.

All the seven-digit phone numbers we used to hold space for required real, if minuscule amounts of energy. This is now free. Multiply that by all the mundane information that we can now query Web 2.0 for and the savings must be substantial. So what do we use this energy for?

Unfortunately, “learning new things” likely gets deprioritized by most people in favor of seeking entertainment. Using Web 2.0 to move learning up that priority list is a worthwhile mission I am happy to help with.