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A Model of Disunified Human Experience
Eric Schwitzgebel, The Splintered Mind, 2026/03/25

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As background, you might want to first read Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis (it's OK, I hadn't seen it either). This is a great article with an even better diagram articulating how (conscious) experience in a 'neuronal workspace' may be connected to and informed by (unconscious) more specialized 'workspaces'. It makes me think of 'communities of communities'. "Baars's global workspace involves processors related to the past (memory), present (sensory input, attention), and future (value systems, motor plans, verbal report). Thus, the global workspace achieves experiential integration that is, in terms drawn from the philosophy of mind, both synchronic (at a particular point) and diachronic (over time)." Now that we're caught us, Eric Schwitzgebel throws a spanner into the works - what if there is no global unified workspace? "On this model, disunity is the normal human condition. Our experiences are fragmented, except when we pull them together through attention. We just don't realize that fact."

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Who will get us there?
David Truss, Daily-Ink, 2026/03/25

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This article starts by quoting in full a post of mine that has gotten some traction on LinkedIn describing "the impact of AI on higher education." It was preparation for an event I'll participate in later this year. The thrust of David Truss's comment isn't to agree or push back, but rather, to ask, who will get us to this vision? Who is this 'we' of which I speak? "'We' won't get there following the guidance of financially lucrative edu-tech business," he writes. "'We' won't get there like we did with Web2.0 tools in the late 2000's and early 2010's, on the backs of tech savvy educators leading the charge. 'We' won't get there because of some governmental vision pushing a new AI enhanced curriculum." Fair point. If the model of 'educators' is 'teachers working in schools following institutional guidelines' then they are unlikely to move us from point A to point B. No, I was thinking (and this should surprise no one) of 'educators' as 'people like me' - working as educators but not typically in education. I have long said that change will come from outside the system. I don't doubt today that this remains true. 

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The Role of Higher Education Journal in Shaping Global Knowledge Networks
Aydın Bulut, Higher Education, 2026/03/25

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I have long been fascinated by the observation that the fields I cover here are composed of what might be called 'communities of communities', that is, clusters of writers and practitioners that tend to coalesce into smaller cooperative networks while still being connected to the wider community. This article (29 page PDF) in Higher Education both embraces and resists that idea when it comes to a history of its own contents. It wants to be a systemic review, but the data don't coalesce into a single overarching theme. We see an ebb and flow of ideas and concepts, along with the citation networks of practitioners that swirl around them. "The early 2000s saw... the onset of institutional and methodological transformation... 2006-2015... indicates a shift towards macro-level analyses, emphasising structural, political, and social dimensions of higher education... 2021-2025... suggests a renewed orientation towards measurement, pedagogical modelling, and teacher-centred research." (p.s. the diagrams could have used much tighter editing; the headings of table 2 are incorrect, the hierarchical structure of Figure 3 is masked by lines flowing for no reason behind blue circles, the prominent (and hyphenated) 'higher-education' in the word cloud is suspicious, and the flow from concept to concept in Figure 7 appears to be arbitrary).

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The First Minutes: Designing Care-Based, Culturally Relevant Class Openings
Norline Wild, Faculty Focus, 2026/03/25

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This article promises to help instructors "learn how care-based, culturally relevant class openings build belonging, strengthen faculty-student relationships, and increase student engagement from the first minutes." It struck me as I read it how the centre of focus and attention is on the instructor throughout. My approach is different, more direct, and (if I may say) less performative. Near the beginning of most of my talks or presentations, I say something like "this presentation is about you, not me." What that means, I say briefly, is that participants can change what's happening at any time - ask questions, make comments, challenge arguments, switch to a different topic. I tell them what I have planned, and ask if that's OK. Most audiences just go with the flow, which makes sense, because they've come to take advantage of my expertise, but sometimes they want to do something different, and I'm always game for that, because what we're doing is something mutual, together, and not 'me doing something to them'.

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Carving Linoleum Continues
Tom Woodward, Bionic Teaching, 2026/03/25

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This article fits into a category of articles I might call 'humans still doing things machines could probably do better'. Recently I saw an article ask, "why do we still have children run in gym class when an Uber could take them the same distance in a minute?" I reflected on my own experiences being taught (badly) gold, curling and dancing by a gym teacher. Anyhow, in this article Tom Woodward practices carving linoleum to create prints. I like the "mediocre" birds, the misshapen elephants' ears, the revisited can of sardines. I like the mistakes, the scrawl, and the originality. It reminds us that evolution happens in the errors; design didn't produce the human brain, mistakes did. And as Woodward says, "Learn all the stuff. Do as many things as you can. Avoid repetitive stress syndrome in your brain, body, and soul."

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New, free language learning tool in Google Translate
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2026/03/25

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You'll find this new tool in the mobile version of Translate, not the desktop version (I checked). For me the hardest part of language learning is understanding what speakers are speaking (my reading comprehension in a number of languages is way better). This tool is great for listening practice. I found it similar in many ways to Duolingo, but there's more user control over the exercises and activities (for example, 'make it harder' buttons). What it really needs, though, are voice controls. Then I could practice my Spanish and French while riding my bike. The tool, currently free, is in beta.

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Toward a Critical Agentic Systems Design Practice
Eryk Salvaggio, Cybernetic Forests, 2026/03/25

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You could prpobably skip the first half of this talk, which makes the point that "As these (AI stochastic) parrots stack and interact with one another, we come to the pandemonium, this crisis of the stochastic flock: unmanaged, independently motivated systems competing or depending on one another, constrained by this mixture of probability and reference with cascading and uncontrollable results." I mean, it's a good image, but that's about it. The really practical value comes in the second part where Eryk Salvaggio describes "seven warnings for critical agentic design". They're short, but they take some thought. What does it mean to say "agents require air traffic control," for example? Or that "agents haunt and are haunted?" It's not your usual list of concerns; it's a layer deeper.

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The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness
Alexander Lerchner, Google DeepMind, PhilPapers, 2026/03/25

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This is a lovely paper (16 page PDF) that needs someone to really take the time to do a proper refutation. The main argument is based on the idea that for the symbols manipulated by an AI to mean anything, they must be based on actual physically experienced causal events. And "if an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture." One might ask, if this is true, why are some syntactic architectures (eg., human neural networks) conscious while others (eg., rocks) are not. Indeed, to push the questioning further, on what basis do we argue that there even is a syntactic architecture over and above the physical instantiation. One may as well argue (as I would) that the physical constitution doesn't 'have' consciousness, it is consciousness, and consciousness in physical systems arises if they are organized in certain ways (which are described by network topologies). 

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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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