I was mystified by the paper--at first. The opening line "There is a revolution taking place in education..." is so familiar to anyone who has been in the business a long time. It has been the opening line in sales pitches for authoring systems and in those wishy-washy reports by pundits who have never written any CBT ever since I can remember. As I worked through the paper, it was all in the same vein. A few examples:
[quoting Norman/Spohrer paper] At the heart of the change are new technologies that enable many of the constructive ideas to be carried out.
Technology is certainly a catalyst for change...
Authoring tools, design tools, component software standards, improved distribution... are all critical to widespread viability outside pilot classrooms.
Challenging professions can excite the imaginations of learners.
Meaningless tosh, of course. A summary document referring to other papers that itself contains little of value.
Then I realized--it's 1st April. These guys have just taken an old paper from the late seventies, added a few up-to-date words like "multimedia" and "constructivism," and tied it up with references to some recent work. The sentence "The dimensions of effectiveness and viability were not the focus of these papers" is the piece de resistance. These guys have done research on some areas of their interest without knowing if it's any good. Absolutely classic joke material. Nice try fellas--but I wasn't fooled.