Keynote: Professor James Boyle, Center for Study of the Public Domain

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Learning By Design and other Fallacies: What Behavioral Economics, Serendipity and Procrastination Can Teach Us About Educational Technology

Behavioral economics has taught economists what non-economists had always claimed. People do not act as the rational actor model predicts. But behavioral economics teaches something more. There are predictable patterns in the ways that human behavior diverges from rational actor predictions. We routinely overvalue potential losses and undervalue potential gains. We rely on heuristics that "frame" problems in a manner that leads to well-understood skewing in our decisions. And so on. In his keynote address, Professor Boyle will argue that there are equivalents to these behavioral patterns in the ways we think about educational materials and technology: systematic biases in the ways that we understand (or faily to understand) their potential and to plan for their future. In particular, we systematically overestimate our ability to predict the uses of technology, and systematically undervalue the productive power of collective, common or "open" resources. Knowledge of these two cognitive biases, he argues, provides useful rules of thumb in designing new educational systems; if we cannot overcome our biases, we can at least learn to compensate for them.

MP3 of the plenary: calicon06PlenaryBoyle.mp3

Video (WMV format): calicon06PlenaryBoyle.wmv

James Boyle
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law
Duke University School of Law

About Elmer Masters

Elmer R. Masters is the Director of Technology at the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (www.cali.org) where he works on interesting projects involving technology and legal education like eLangdell, Classcaster, Lawbooks, QuizWright, and the CALI website. He has over 30 years of experience building tech tools for legal education and systems for accessing law and legal materials on the Internet. He is the admin of the Teknoids mailing list (www.teknoids.net) and has been blogging about legal education, law, and technology for over 20 years (www.symphora.com). He has a JD from Syracuse University College of Law and was employed by Syracuse, Cornell Law School, and Emory University School of Law before joining CALI in 2003. Elmer has presented at the CALI Conference for Law School Computing (where he organizes the program), the AALL and AALS Annual Meetings, Law Via The Internet, and other conferences, symposia, and workshops on topics ranging from IT management in law schools to building open access court reporting systems to information architecture design and implementation in law.
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