Thursday, June 28, 2012

Expanding on Role-play with Interactive Technologies

An excerpt from the upcoming book Teaching, Learning and Technology at Harvard Law School.
By Kimberley Hall

Clinical Professor Robert Bordone combines role-play with interactive technologies to record, assess and reflect on key steps in the student negotiation process. In the school’s flagship Negotiation Workshop, Bordone uses interactive technologies to capture student results in the Ellsworth v. Ellsworth case, the capstone to the course, where students act as family lawyers.  In his new advanced Multiparty, Decision-Making, and Teams Negotiation Workshop, Bordone leverages technology in running the C02 simulation where students confront collective action problems in their role international policymakers negotiating their nations’ carbon emissions over a 20 year period.

Family Law: Ellsworth v. Ellsworth

Students negotiate the terms of a divorce decree in teams of two, representing the two spouses, Bill and Ellen Ellsworth in a divorce.  The clients in this case are played by real actors often recruited from the community or the ranks of HLS staff and administration.

Bordone presents the students with a comprehensive set of issues to negotiate both during class time and over the course of a weekend, including assets, custody and

future expenses such as college education and medical care. The parties come to resolutions and log their decisions on a Web-based interface through multiple-choice fields and include comments explaining their agreements in class.

The software is programmed to compile and display the results visually, facilitating comparisons through bar graphs that can be pasted into slideshows. Once all students have completed the negotiation, Bordone and his team access and evaluate the results.

A comparative analysis is made among the groups in class where peers discuss one another’s results.

The student interface that the Law School was able to provide us for collecting our data has enabled us to provide students information that we used to have to calculate by hand. Moreover, we can now give our students a deep dive into comparative results across different negotiations in the class. The interface developed by our colleagues in the Library has taken this simulation to a new level.

International Policy: The Carbon Emissions Game

In the advanced Multiparty Negotiation Workshop class that Bordone offered to students at HLS for the first time this past fall, students represent a single country in environmental negotiations like the Copenhagen Conference on Global Warming.  Their task is topersuade other countries to reduce carbon emissions while at the same time protecting their own industries and ability to grow their individual economies.. The negotiations take place in discrete rounds where students first discuss their projected emissions before going into a room to record their promised levels of carbon emission
Through the recorded votes in the automated .csv file the clicker software creates, Professor Bordone was able to take the game from a simple idea into one that actively incorporates many of the complexities and variables of actual negotiations. For example, the technology allows Bordone to introduce complexity into the negotiation by adding random events such as an economic downturns, natural disasters, and reduction through clickers.

internal political strife.After discussion, students vote for the first round. They then return to their groups for further negotiation, voting and discussing up to 15 rounds.

Countries operate under different constraints, with more powerful countries exercising more influence on the outcome of each round. The news stories that are incorporated into the game influencethe decisions made by the students. By integrating MS Excel and PowerPoint through creating Macros with Visual Basic, the game is able to manage large sets of data, facilitating the interaction between all 24 countries over the course of 15 rounds of negotiation. Finally, as with the Ellsworth game, final votes are displayed
“Without the technology that the library was able to provide to run the CO2 game, it would have been impossible to run the negotiation in real-time without a staff of at least 3 or 4 teaching assistants collecting an analyzing the results in a frantic way . Moreover, we would not have been able to simulate the complexity that makes the negotiation so rich,” says Bordone.through bar graphs and displayed for class analysis and discussion.