One last chance to complete the survey telling me what work I could do is most useful and valuable to you. I've posted preliminary results, but I'm closing it Monday, and will update the article if there are any changes.
Feature Article
Thinking of my Obituary
Stephen Downes,
Half an Hour,
2026/09/21
I'm getting old enough now that thinking about what I want my obituary to say is not some vague hypothetical but instead is something visible on the horizon. So asking myself what my obituary to say isn't just some exercise to orient and make my life better, as suggested in this article.
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The Synthesis Is Here
Frederick M. Lawrence, Alfred Spector,
The American Scholar,
2026/09/21
According to this article, technologists need to study more of the liberal arts, while those in the liberal arts need to embrace technology. "By suggesting that we need to fuse technology and the liberal arts, we are explicitly affirming the need to balance topics like economic growth, political expediency, and human desires with the humanistic insights developed over the centuries." Otherwise, "technology's effects could well be harmful." Even assuming anyone has the time to study all that (and over my lifetime I have genuinely tried) it's not clear that any genuinely deep civilization-saving insight results. We already know that systems devoted to the single-minded pursuit of anything - whether paperclips or money - lead to undesirable consequences, but we build them anyway. But more, I just don't see this argument as particularly deep. Sure, we should pool out knowledge. But then what? Do we even know what we want and what we reasonably fear? I don't get a sense of that here. Via Mark Oehlert.
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What Happens When Grading Costs Almost Nothing?
Marc Watkins,
Rhetorica,
2026/09/21
This article follows a well-established pattern for this sort of writing: a new capability is described, we get some examples of it at work, then we read some cautionary remarks about misusing the capability. In this case, the capability is very low cost automated assessment, courtesy System One + Jev. It uses a grading rubric and natural language student text as input, and saves money by avoiding costly next-token text generation in its output. The caution: "When you write to please a machine, you enter into a feedback loop that may not benefit your learning. While some writing tasks are straightforward and don't necessarily require much process work, the type of long-form and engaged writing many college courses call upon asks students to develop their responses via close reading of primary and secondary sources, multiple drafts, peer review, instructor feedback, and above all, time."
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More Degrees But Not Higher Earnings: Puzzling Data from CUNY’s Famed ASAP program
Jill Barshay,
KQED,
2026/09/21
The City University of New York (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) has helped many more students earn degrees, but according to this article, "a recent 14-year study finds that those additional degrees haven't translated into higher earnings." The rest of the article considers possible explanations: associate degrees aren't valued, maybe, or too many of them are in the humanities. I thought that maybe the economy in general was a pretty good reason. Or it could just be that the study is fatally flawed: "the averages include people who are unemployed or working outside of New York state (counted as earning zero)." This seems like a study determined to undermine the program. For though "CUNY says ASAP's mission isn't simply to maximize earnings, and there may be other personal and societal benefits to finishing a degree that wages cannot measure" Jill Barshay nonetheless writes "if taxpayers are spending tens of millions of dollars on an intensive intervention, earnings are one legitimate outcome to examine."
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Defining collectivism as duties in relationships rather than generalized warmth improves predictive validity in 100 cultures
Thomas Talhelm, et al.,
Nature,
2026/09/21
This is an odd article. On the one hand, it points to what may be a genuine mischaracterization of collectivism. On the other hand, it uses loaded terminology and feels like it may be an attempt to mislead readers. Your call. Here's the gist: our traditional view of East versus West is that the former is more collectivist while the latter is more individualist. However, the authors assert, studies fail to find that distincction in practice. They propose splitting the defition of collectivism into 'warm fuzzies' and 'responsibilism'. These are distinct in the the former favours general affirmations of obligations to wider groups and strangers, while the latter emphasizes responsibilities to close knit groups like families and communities. Reapples, the scale predicts differences in Eastern cultures (deemed 'responsibilist') and Western cultures ('warm fuzzies'). "Although warm fuzzy collectivism is not the same concept as individualism, it is paradoxically more common in individualistic cultures... Warm fuzzy collectivism and responsibilism are different ways of prioritizing social relationships, not a walling off from relationships."
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Carney wants Canada to join Europe's Erasmus+ program. What is it?
David Cummings,
CBC,
2026/09/21
The possibility of closer ties between Canada and Europe is pushing some programs familiar to educators into the national spotlight. One is "Horizon, Europe's research and innovation funding program in which Canada already participates," and is looking to join again in its next iteration. I participated in a Horizon project a few years ago (and if proponents are looking for Canadian partners in the private sector, that's me!). Another is Erasmus+, " the flagship EU program allows people to study and train at institutions across Europe for up to a year (and) has since expanded to include exchanges for work experience, apprenticeships and sport."
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The “Experts Excel and Novices Don’t” critique gets the AI educational situation backwards
Mike Caulfield,
The End(s) of Argument,
2026/09/21
Mike Caulfield responds to the argument that "you need to know things in order to learn from an AI." This gets it backward, he says. To succeed means that "as the critics admit, I cannot do that without knowing things which means I have to get on learning things... The system you want in a classroom is one that allows you to amazing things if you buckle down and do the intellectual work." It takes a bit of reading to get to this point - the extended horror movie classification scheme example he uses to introduce the topic doesn't speak to me at all. But yeah - we want challenges that force us to figure it out, and usually, that means a lot of reading, thinking, trial and error, with or without AI. This idea - he grounds it in Vygotski's zone of proximal development (ZPD) - isn't something teachers learn when they learn to teach with AI. Instead they learn about "a system that continues to model these as ways to shovel information into students rather than engines of exploration."
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Copyright 2026 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
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