Speakers
BbT26 opens with one of the most influential scholars of American education on how the system actually works, and why most attempts to change it get absorbed by it. Two of the most forward-looking voices in edtech on whether AI is the platform shift that finally breaks the pattern.
Opening Keynote
Know It Before You Mess with It
How the American education system actually works.
Thirty years ago, the internet arrived in higher education and generated wild excitement, real concern, and predictions that ranged from the prescient to the absurd. Today, AI is doing the same.
David Labaree asks a different question. Not what education should be. How it actually works, and why most attempts to change it get absorbed by it.
A keynote that is rare at a technology conference, and exactly the right place to begin one.
David LabareeSociologist of Education, Stanford Professor Emeritus
David Labaree is one of the most influential scholars writing on American education. His books, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, Someone Has to Fail, and A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education, are widely considered foundational to the modern understanding of school reform, the contested purposes of education, and the rise of American higher education. His 1997 framework on the three competing purposes of American schooling, democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility, is one of the most widely cited models in the field. He is the Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus at Stanford and a 2025 inductee into the National Academy of Education.
Read more at: davidlabaree.com.
If Day 1 returns to first principles, Day 2 looks forward. Labaree examines how previous technology platform shifts have been absorbed by the institutions they were meant to change. Matthew Pittinsky and Lev Gonick argue why AI might finally break that pattern.
Fireside Conversation
Learning Management, at Last
Matthew Pittinsky and Lev Gonick on the LMS, AI, and what comes next.
After thirty years, why has the LMS paradigm changed so little? What did the original vision get right, what did the market settle for instead, and is AI actually the platform shift that finally changes the category?
Matthew Pittinsky, who co-founded Blackboard in 1997 and helped create the LMS, has been writing about exactly this question for the past year. Lev Gonick, who runs enterprise technology at ASU, has been building the answer in real time. In most rooms, you would expect the entrepreneur to be the impatient one and the CIO to be the cautious one. With these two, the roles tend to flip.
A candid, occasionally contrarian conversation, designed to be useful long after the conference ends.
Matthew Pittinsky, Ph.D.Guest Speaker; Leading Industry Voice
Matthew co-founded Blackboard in 1997 and helped create the LMS category. After serving as CEO and Executive Chairman of Blackboard, he led Parchment from 2011 to 2024. His two-part series The LMS at 30, published on Phil Hill's On EdTech, is among the most creative, forward-looking arguments for how AI can finally change the LMS category itself.
Read more at: matthewpittinsky.com.
Lev GonickEnterprise Chief Information Officer, Arizona State University
Lev leads enterprise technology at ASU, where the university became the first to formally collaborate with OpenAI in January 2024. His series, The TechEd Revolution, drawn from that work, argues that we are moving from technology that supports teaching to technology that drives learning. He has spent more than three decades building digital infrastructure in higher education, including a decade as CIO at Case Western Reserve.
Read more at: search.asu.edu/profile/3202000.