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What do universities owe the public?
Ted Hewitt, University Affairs, 2026/04/15

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The title of this post may as well be switched around: what does the public owe universities? That's the tenor of the article, even as author Ted Hewitt in the same breath says "the fundamental role of the university, within its broader societal and community context, is, in my view, seriously at risk, along with our own liberal democracy." He recommends three things: protection of academic freedom, university leaders to maintain an open dialogue with the public, and resourcing. Now sure, the example south of the border is nothing to be emulated. But the response of the university system can't be "support us or the bunny gets it." What the system needs to do, in my opinion, is what it utterly failed to do in the U.S. - enable full participation and success in higher education regardless of socio-economic status. Universities need to directly benefit the entire community. That, to me, looks very different from what we have today. It's certainly not being offered by Hewitt in this article.

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Trust is the Silver Bullet
Josh Brake, The Absent-Minded Professor, 2026/04/15

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I said the other day that another word for 'cognitive offloading' might be 'trust'. We don't manually check everything the AI does because we trust it to do (more or less) the right thing. So the title of this post caught my eye; Josh Brake summarizes and to a degree endorses Stephen M. R. Covey's book The Speed of Trust. "Covey decomposes trust into two main elements: character and competence... character, he argues, is composed of integrity and intent... competence can similarly be decomposed into two pieces, capability and results." These all together represent "a strong foundation of character" that ought to be instilled in students, suggests Brake. But is it a good account of trust? I don't think so, because truth is a much broader concept. We can trust things that are not human and do not possess virtue or intent: trust the math, trust the process, trust the ice, trust in the future. Trust isn't a property of the thing being trusted, it is a willingness on our side to grant certain expectations to it regarding the outcome.

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An Explanation of AI that Could Be Wrong (Which is Good)
Michael Feldstein, eLiterate, 2026/04/15

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This is an introduction to a paper, the full text of which is found here. Michael Feldstein has alo provided some AI structures that both help explain what the paper says and test the predictions offered in the paper. I didn't use the AI components, but I did read the intro post and the paper as a whole, which was well worth the effort. It defies summarization in a short post such as this, but here goes: transformer-based AI (such as ChatGPT) learn complex and apparently rule-based systems (such as language or chess) by preserving distinctions that have predictive import in a given context, and discarding the rest. Feldstein calls this the conservation of predictive meaning (CPM) theory. My assessment is that he is not wrong. I say it that way because I would word things a bit differently and draw slightly different conclusions. What he calls 'distinctions' I would call 'patterns'. What he calls "a general mechanism to reduce predictive surprise" I would call 'salience'. I would not say language learners are "like effective cryptographers", nor would I say they "decode what has been communicated." Overall, though, I think he is on the right track.

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One size fits none: let communities build for themselves
Ben Werdmuller, 2026/04/15

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I think this is exactly right, and applies to learning technology as well: "In a world where custom code can be created far more easily than it could in the past, communities can more easily build bespoke spaces for themselves. There's no need to adopt a one-size-fits-all platform - even an open source one - when you can ask for the exact features you want." Rather, "What would be needed then are agreed-upon rules about how community platforms behave." This is where it gets tricky, because protocol-writers have historically been over-ambitious in their scope. My view is that syntax belongs to protocols, while semantics belongs to communities. That's (in my view) what Werdmuller describes as "the human stuff that rises to the top when code becomes more of a solved problem."

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Literate communities have always looked different to their critics
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2026/04/15

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This is a well-argued and dare I say literate response to critics of screen culture. "When you've closed 800 libraries and gutted the infrastructure through which people build reading communities," writes Doug Belshaw, "blaming screens is a conclusion in search of a cause." Woven through the argument is Belshaw's account of what it means to be literate. "To be literate is to be part of a literate community. This involves sharing references, arguing about ideas, and having the knowledge to participate in discourse." Different communities have different kinds of literacies. It's also a good response, to my mind, to the argument based on 'cognitive offloading' and AI. "These young people weren't less capable than previous cohorts; they were differently capable." Ultimately, "If we want to defend democracy, we should be defending the conditions that make critical engagement with it possible."

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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