Friday Keynote: Learning by Design and Other Fallacies: What Behavioral Economics, Serendipity, and Procrastination Can Teach Us About Educational Technology
James Boyle, Duke University School of Law

Boyle spoke about what we all *think* we know and what we really don't know about technology.

He began with a lesson in behavioral economics. According to behavioral economists, people systematically do not act in the way that wealth maximizing rational people should behave. But this behavior is not random. In practice, we vastly overvalue potential losses and vastly undervalue potential gains. And this, according to Boyle, is why people buy extended warranties.

There are also similar patterns in the way we misperceive technology. For one thing, we are horrendously bad at predicting the uses of technology. The telephone, for example, was initially imagined by most as a one-to-many technology in which several users would simultaneously pick up their receivers to hear scheduled information (e.g., weather reports) or entertainment (e.g., the symphony). No one really saw it as the two way technology it became.

(Here Boyle noted that the most frequent early adopters of new technologies that eventually catch on with the general public are pornographers. However, he hoped to leave us with a more optimistic message than this.)

We are also systematically bad at predicting the power of open/commons/collaborative systems of innovation.

What is an open system? The English language is one. We don't have to pay to use English and can use it in any way we want. However, not all languages are open: Law French was a closed system.

In 1995, if someone conceived of a huge comprehensive encyclopedia containing all knowledge of human experience, we would have imagined a controlled, property rights restricted, centralized, print, corporately branded print resource. No one would have "designed" the internet as it is today. If it had been designed, it would have been a closed system, because given our druthers, we'd redesign Minitel and Encyclopædia Britannica over and over and over again.

That's not to say that all systems should be open. Some systems operate much better closed. Bank accounts and grade books are just two examples. But true innovation combines both open and closed systems, and we need a balance of the two.

How exactly does the human attitude towards technology resemble behavioral economics? We vastly overvalue closed systems and vastly undervalue open systems, thereby creating an imbalance of systems.

We as creators/providers have not fully embraced the idea that our users should also be our developers. To the greatest extent possible, we should push to have all of our educational material available to the general public. When information is made freely available, you discover uses, add-ons, and feedback you hadn't imagined.

Google Maps is a prime example of this. The layering of information onto the maps by users is precisely what makes Google Maps so exciting and interesting.

When data is made available to the public, we also find audiences we didn't know we had. When the government's Medline database became available to the public, no one expected lay people to use it heavily. But they did. And as annoying as an "informed" patient can be to physicians, that knowledge can greatly reduce the risk that malpractice will be committed.

How do we open legal information to the general public? We are all members of a community that has a responsibility to break down its professional rules and open its system. So don't just give people access to the information. Instead, let them add to and revise it.

A good example of this is Rice's Connexions. All educational information is added to the system in small modules. Then other users create roadmaps to lead people through the various modules. A module may be included within an infinite number of roadmaps for an infinite number of purposes. Still others come along and leave comments on all of this.

If we move to an open system, what should we expect to see on the legal front? Content providers will be very good at seeing the costs of allowing copying and very bad at seeing the benefits. To know this you need look no farther than the VCR, which movie studios tried desperately to ban -- and when they failed they made billions off the technology. And with the creation of an open system, you can expect existing content providers to and persuade Congress to protect them.

What about technology? We should expect people to be try and change the open nature of the personal computer, to close it off from the outside and only allow it to run approved protocols. This is precisely what proponents of Trusted Computing are already doing. Despite innovation, the dominant human instinct is to close the system.

Educational technology needs a balance between open and closed systems. Westlaw is a great product in many cases. However, there is great tension between open and closed legal information systems right now. Publishers can still make money, but there's no reason why they can't they improve access for and enrichment from users in the process.