This is the dialogue this medium ought to promote. Reigeluth's response is reasoned and reasonably comprehensive. Yet he fails to address how his formulation is particularly new or different from that of a large number of earlier philosophers and analysts who promoted developmental cycles (ala Montessori, 1900) as opposed to time-in-class, mastery learning (ala Winnetka Plan, 1935), flexible scheduling and differentiated staffing (ala Allen, et al., 1965), performance based teacher education (ala BEPD from 1964 through 1971), and a host of other fairly old and still interesting ideas and strategies. He also fails to use paradigm the way it would be used by structuralists or other philosophers--as a comprehensive system rather than a set of "key markers." Finally, I frankly don't see the need for a paradigm when there are so many other, more critical needs in educational philosophy, psychology, and instructional design.
For example, in a forthcoming article for TC Record, Eric Cooper and I focus on the innovations coming out of the Ohio Telecommunications initiatives. There is a great deal of theory building needed when middle school kids develop proposals under contract by local business people to get state funds to connect their schools and towns to the Internet, in order to develop a national business market for those local businesses. Is this a design initiated by some state rfp? by the Kiwanis? by teachers? by kids? by technologists? When the proposal includes video and computer generated graphics done by 8th graders, it blows away the competition regardless of any of its other messages. Does this suggest that McLuhan has gone ahead of the medium, as it were?
These somewhat facile examples, and many more drawn from NetDays everywhere, suggest that conceptual models of instructional design are outdated before they are transmitted on the net. They suggest the need to design evaluation strategies (whole strategies, yet not whole paradigms) which capture unanticipated benefits and build those values into new programs. They suggest the critical need to create incentives through which real world entrepreneurial skills--which are just as much real world to Ohio as to Pakistan--can infuse instruction and education with the vitality of a technology whose primary characteristic is change. Whereas we once contemplated change as a condition of education, it is now so much more accelerated that formal educational systems are collapsing under a dynamic which transcends classrooms and class, language and literature.
So, why bother with a paradigm when there are not enough models around to assemble a conceptual scheme. Pask's Conversation Theory is fine, but Socrates said it first, and that was way before industrialism. By the way, summer vacations and a six hour day are a heritage of an agrarian educational system, way before the Industrial Revolution, and it was only because a contractor built the Quincy School with eight rooms (1848) that eight grades define primary schools in the United States. Bricks define policy, and industry had very little to do with it. If you want to blame the rigidity of American Education on anything, it probably reflects the rigidity of particular ethnic groups and their fear of illegitimate economic or social mobility more than Henry Ford. Edison had a Montessori class in his living room, and he had a lot more to do with industrializing America than you or I. That class had multi-age grouping, peer tutoring, tons of technology, student-centered teacher observers, and most of the other "paradigmatic markers" of the proposed scheme.
Sorry to nag, but history was once one of my doctoral fields. I still see no need to re-conceive the whole system since Montessori and Dewey did a fine job of reconceiving it exactly the way you are now proposing its reconception. How often must we return to the womb, much same to the same womb?