Between this post, Luke’s post, and Jim’s post, we’ve once again seen blogs definitively outperform the mainstream media outlets. BRAVO!!

I do know that Jeff didn’t follow up with anyone between the event and the time the article was published, which seems like many missed opportunities for a reporter to clarify and expand on some of the ideas circulated that day. But it was clear that Jeff wanted to write a BlackBoard v. Blogs/David v. Goliath article from the time I spoke with him three days before the event. Still, he was there all day and spoke with lots of folks who tried to contextualize our work differently, as I had, so I held out hope that the article might pay more attention to the arguments about teaching and learning that we made. It didn’t. Nor did it even name the freaking event, which you’d think might be of some interest to readers of the Chronicle.

At least the interview with the Right Rev was unmediated.

I hadn’t read the CHE article until I saw your post (via twitter, as it turns out). Having done so now, I do agree that there’s a strangely Blackboard-oriented focus to Young’s reporting, including what strikes me as fairly selective quoting (he doesn’t note, for example, the jokey tone of nearly all of those “blackboard-killer” lines – iirc, Joe Ugaretz literally followed the one Young quotes with “just kidding”), and the strange final word given to Blackboard in the article:

“I think the model for the CMS is outdated given the new Web, and I think that’s one of the problems,” [Jim Groom] said. “It can serve certain functions well, but it’s hard for proprietary CMS’s, whatever they are, to keep up with the how the Web is changing.”

Blackboard is trying to keep up.

Michael L. Chasen, the company’s chief executive, has told The Chronicle that the latest version of the software integrates some Web 2.0 tools and still offers plenty of features that blogging packages can’t match, like online gradebooks.

Even if we leave aside the time lag between releases that a closed-source platform like Bb takes (a lag measured in years, which hardly addresses Jim’s complaint); even if we leave aside the strangeness (audacity?) of suggesting that the blogging and wiki tools within Bb are “web 2.0″ when they don’t generate or draw on rss feeds, pingbacks, or tags (no crowd or cloud knowledge-generating), and when only the admin gets to keep a copy after the course ends (self-authorship is limited and must be authorized); even leaving these things aside, Young and Chasen miss the real point that you, Mikhail, hit on the head: we’re not trying to change the way education is “delivered”; we’re trying to change education.

If you really want to get some steam flowing out of your ears, check out the discussion forum in response to the article. The prevailing view in there is that what’s most important in a CMS that it facilitate timed, multiple-choice testing and distribution of all-rights-reserved reading materials. Talk about missing the point!

CUNY WordCampEd was not about blogs. It was not about Blackboard. It was about CUNY. This may not be of interest to the vast majority of the Chronicle’s readership, but it matters to me and to all of us who learned so much from the presentations and the conversations at CUNY WordCampEd.

To quote Harry Dean in Escape from NY, “Exactly, precisely.” This was a much needed re-framing of Young’s article, CUNY WordCampEd was all about the CUNY!

You have done well to fully describe the experience as opposed to the Chronicle’s pandering to sensationalize and trivialize.