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