Google As A Memory Crutch - Does this give some insight into how we should teach and assess learning?

When I was a teenager my memory was incredibly good.  Once exposed to some information I could recall it, in its totality, with ease.  As I age and see this ability erode, I am saddened.  For whatever reason, the decline is usually associated with not being able to come up with the name of a person.  There are shreds of memory that are still available, but I'm vexed by what the person's name is. I wish I then had an algorithm to follow in my head that would eventually produce retrieval of the name with a high success rate.  But I haven't found such an algorithm. Each time I experience this, I go through a novel search in my head for the name.  It is frustrating to do.  Yet, so far, I'm not willing to concede that I won't come up with the name at all.  More about this below.  

Some years ago, when my memory wasn't deteriorating quite so obviously, I had a similar issue regarding facial recognition, particularly with actors seen in a TV show.  The face looks familiar.  Have I seen the face in something else, so the recognition is real, not a false positive?  I learned about IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base).  IMDB also includes TV programming, which is good because there is a lot of cross pollination between the movies and TV.  I'd see somebody in a TV show years after I had seen the person in a movie (which I watched on TV).  Was it really the same person or not?  IMDB gives a "filmography" of each actor and you can scroll through the list of that to see whether there is movie that you've seen before.  If you find that movie, it is a relief.  Your instinct was on the mark.  If you don't, it's likely a false positive and you confounded the person with someone else.  

Recently I've been doing something similar with Google searches, where in this case it is somebody in the public eye who is not an actor, or it is a well-known historical figure, or possibly an event or social movement.  It seems odd to search for something that you feel you already know.  So, in some sense this isn't learning, it's remembering.  I do it because it is much quicker than my mental retrieval processes, where the gears can be turning for quite a while before a result is produced.  

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Now I want to try this in reverse.  Consider the number below.  What event do you associate with it?  Please do not do a search to try to answer this question.  Simply use recall, if you can. 

1215.

My guess is that most people my age (I'm 65 and will be 66 next January) can make this identification without doing a search.  I'd likewise guess that most current college students can't do this, but that's only a guess. 

Now, here's the deal about teaching which this little example illustrates.  Students are prone to memorize.  I've railed about college students memorization for a long time. I've felt that instead students need to produce a narrative about what they learn and incorporate the ideas that way.  The narrative will help commit the ideas to memory and will simultaneously produce a degree of understanding that pure memorization will be unable to achieve.  Further, students typically lose these memories they made by rote if they don't use the ideas subsequently.  The narrative helps the student commit the ideas to long term memory.  Yet, my railing notwithstanding, students in large numbers appear wedded to memorization.  So, maybe we should try to make the students better at memorization.  

With this, I know it is very old fashioned to ask what happened on such and such a date, but maybe there was some virtue to it.  In the case of the example above, students my age when learning World (mostly European) history, learned about the Magna Carta, which was issued in 1215.  (I confess here that before I Googled it, I thought it was 1216, close but no cigar.)  

I don't recall how we were taught about the Magna Carta, but I'm guessing it was taught as a simple hierarchy.  At the pinnacle was the Magna Carta itself. Subordinate to that was the date, 1215, the King of England at the time, King John, and what the document did, guaranteed certain human rights and made the King subject to the law. What I'm suggesting as a change in the way we teach is to abandon the hierarchy in the representation and instead treat it as a vector. (Any component of that vector could be the search term in Google.)   

Then we might teach certain vectors that you'd think wouldn't be in normal courses.  For example, some years ago I read a book Einstein and Picasso.  The linkage is that both worked on understanding simultaneity and did so at approximately in the same historical moment, which suggests there were happenings in that moment that would make simultaneity a worthy object of investigation to the creative mind. Obviously, however, they did this from quite different perspectives.  If you believe physics is physics and art is art, you'll never see this connection.  In contrast, if you consider the larger idea, simultaneity, then the connection will be evident.  This does suggest something for hierarchical rendering, but I'd stick with teaching the vector form, even here.  If that's the method that students learn, then persist with the method.  

Let me close with a bit about assessment of that learning.  The key is to test on each component of the vector, not just one component.  In so doing, students will begin to learn things from multiple perspectives (that of each individual component).   And perhaps in the assessment students should be allowed to use a search engine to answer the questions.  The interesting cases then will be where the "right answer" is not at the top of what the search engine returns.  Can the students find that answer nonetheless?  This seems to me worth trying.