I am always glad to see Dave Merrill take the time to share with others what is in his head and heart with regard to instructional design, and I could almost see that slightly devilish gleam in Steve Tripp s eyes. So, I thought I would venture a response from the land of frozen fjords.
With regard to real estate, there is a common saying that the three most important things are location, location, and location--with regard to love (or was it humor) there is a similar analysis, with timing playing the critical role. With regard to meaning, context is arguably the key factor, and I realize that I am missing the context for Dave's original remarks. Having made such a slip on a previous occasion, I wanted to apologize in advance should I happen to misconstrue things and inadvertently offend someone.
The tone of Dave's remarks disturbs me much more than the content. For example, in the first paragraph we proceed from "philosophical winds" and "uncertain science and technology" to very definite claims that instructional design is both a science and a technology. The tone here is "I am going to set things straight once and for all."
A bit later there is a short paragraph directed at those who claim that knowledge is founded on collaboration rather than empirical science or who claim that all truth is relative. Dave says that these people are clearly not instructional designers and that they have disassociated themselves from the discipline. The tone here is "I am not going to take such people seriously."
Then Dave claims that many people in educational technology are engaged in a flight from science and that instructional design is not merely philosophy. And in his conclusion, Dave makes reference to the sand of relativism, the rock of science, and the shifting sands of new paradigms. He says that he has drawn a line in the sand. The tone of these remarks is "Here is where I shall stand and defend my rock."
I could not help but think about Shelley's Ozymandius.
In short, the tone of Dave's remarks is hardly one of scientific objectivity. It is a passionate tone. I therefore imagine a context in which Dave has been upset by remarks of others. Who are these others? Philosophers? He mentions philosophers several times. I know very few people in the instructional science community with Ph.D.s in philosophy or who claim to be philosophers. But, it is philosophers of science who can and have provided appropriate frameworks for Dave's position (science as discovery, invention, empirical investigation, etc.). It is epistemologists who have provided the framework for learning theory, and, as Dave quite rightly notes, instructional design is that discipline whose aim is to facilitate learning. And, there are numerous other contributions from philosophy which should not go unnoticed in our discipline. In short, the instructional science community could benefit by cultivating closer ties with serious philosophers of science and others.
Or, perhaps the others who have so upset Dave are the constructivists, keying on Dave's use "constructo-babble," as did Steve in his remarks. I, too, have been frustrated by many of the exchanges in the so-called constructivist-instructivist debate. Since Steve has promised us a definitive rejoinder to constructivism, I shall not belabor this issue here, other than to say that I doubt that such "definitive positions and rejoinders" are likely to withstand the shifting sub-structures on which rocks and sand appear from time to time. Take this as my passionate plea for a little more humility with regard to our endeavors.
With regard to the content (as opposed to the tone) of Dave's remarks, I find myself in substantial agreement (not that my agreement counts for anything other than a passing marker in the desert landscape of instructional science). Like Steve [Tripp, 20 Feb 96], I find it odd that Dave sees instructional science as a subset of instructional design. Unlike Steve, I would not regard Eckel's Instruction Language as a statement of instructional science. (Yes, Steve, I also read that book as well as your very thorough review of it.) Rather, I view it as a scientific expression of several aspects of instructional science (an analysis of instructional design, development, and delivery discourse, perhaps).
It would seem more natural to me to conceive of instruction as the broader category, and as a subset of a still broader category which we might call education (see Reigeluth, 1983, for example). As siblings with instruction and subsets of education, there might be some of the things Dave does not believe belong within instructional design (e.g., organizational issues, human resources, etc.). Clearly such disciplines (school administration, social policy, etc.) have some relevance to and impact on instruction (they might be regarded as constituting the larger context for instruction). Moreover, these disciplines can be approached in both scientific and non-scientific ways. Indeed, one can easily find similar debates about the role of scientific inquiry in those disciplines. I side with Dave, however, in saying that they are not part of instructional design per se.
With regard to instruction and its sub-disciplines, one can also find both scientific and non-scientific approaches. While I happen to have a bias for a scientific approach, I do not happen to believe that we will learn everything there is to know about the design of effective instruction through purely empirical approaches. I do believe there is value in questioning and re-examination of basic beliefs and assumptions. Moreover, I believe there is value to be gained from open discourse with those with whom we differ. As Dave and Steve object to radical constructivist views, Plato and Socrates objected to radical relativism as perhaps best expressed by the Sophist Protagoras. Nevertheless, Plato's dialogue concerning Protagoras has Socrates and Protagoras engaged in a lively discussion about whether or not virtue is teachable.
Well, if virtue is teachable, I have no doubt that Dave will tell us how. (Tolstoi, by the way, tells a very interesting story about learning important moral lessons in Confessions--what I remember about his learning is that it occurred without any intention on his part, that it was unplanned (he happened to witness a public execution in Paris), that in fact he resisted learning, but eventually learned that not all that is proclaimed good and decent by society is good and decent). But my point is that it would seem also significant to study how to evaluate the effectiveness of Dave's teaching, and that evaluation discipline has its own methods, some of which are well-established and some of which are still evolving. Evaluation of instruction is not the same as the evaluation of an instructional design.
In closing, I would suggest that we try to locate other significant markers in the desert landscape of instructional science. In addition to Dave's quite substantial work (Component Display Theory, Transaction Theory, ID Expert, etc. ), I would like to nominate Van Marcke's Generic Tutoring Environment (GTE) as another, and Tele-universite's Didactic Engineering Workbench (AGD) as yet another.