Thanks, Rod, for the conference summaries [referring to Sims, 13 Jul 95]. I was in England for a conference at the University of Sheffield on Hypermedia in Engineering Education. Most of the presenters and keynoters were professors or lecturers in engineering, mostly from the UK or Finland. There were smaller numbers from Germany, U.S., and other European countries. There were only two instructional designers present. So we learned a lot.
In spite of the unfortunate results of the trial in Norfolk (does "kangaroo court" translate to Australian?) there is a need for the knowledge base represented by ISD as new groups adopt multimedia and computer aided learning technologies. Several of the papers noted that they learned from experience how not to design CAL or multimedia, when what they learned was fairly common knowledge among ISD people. Perhaps ISD could be released from his sentence to do some community service and save people some time and money relearning what others have learned.
Another common idea in the papers was that the large consortia of universities formed in the UK to develop shared engineering courses were cumbersome and not likely to produce the courses they wanted. It was difficult to produce courses to the same standards, or to integrate courses developed at different institutions.