[quoting Foshay, 26 Feb 97.b] But there still are lots of clueless educators, lest we get our hopes up. Example: I currently have on my desk a multi-million-dollar RFP from an Eastern state. It is a major initiative in response to school-to-work (a movement to build stronger influence of the world of work into schools). The RFP is mostly about hardware and networking. The main software requirement, this state's response to school-to-work, is to put an office suite (e.g., Microsoft Office) on every machine and have kids do their problems with spreadsheets and the like! Curriculum-based software is explicitly excluded from the solicitation!
This does not reflect "cluelessness" on the part of educators (actually education bureaucrats in this instance). It reflects a rational distrust of an underdeveloped field. There have been several references in this conversation to novice versus expert ID developers. There have also been quite a number of references to "maturity" of the field. My experience in my former life as an education bureaucrat has convinced me that the field of instruction technology is far from mature.
Your list of "trivial design" examples is quite short, we each have a dozen examples to add. Your list of well designed examples is also quite short. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that there aren't many of us who could add more than just a few.
Additionally, I note that the good examples are skills development. Is it possible that that is the area where instructional technology has some promise and that we cannot expect it to apply well to other areas such as analysis of historical developments or literary works? Perhaps Carmen teaches us trivial facts because that is all that a computer can accomplish relative to history.
Perhaps we simply are asking too much of a computer. Or is instructional technology just among the "Not-ready-for-prime-time Players?"