Thanks to all who participated in the discussion. We got into some interesting issues, and dealt with some of the nuances of a few of the issues I raised in my original posting. One of the nice things about ITForum is how well it serves as a vehicle for informed discussion of professional opinion. I applaud those who participated, for their opinions, for respecting the opinions of others, and for the overall level of information brought to the dialog.
The dialog only dealt with a handful of the issues underlying the points in the original paper (scarcely surprising, given the limitations of time, space, and my natural tendency to think that everyone ought to regard as vital the issues that I do!) But, if you'll indulge me for a few more bytes, I'd like to return to my original posting, and list out some possible action items. To stay below your system's length limit, I'll confine myself to the severest and most painful of self-disciplines: being concise.
(a) Editors and reviewers can require that articles discussing new technologies be written from a viewpoint of how a given design objective can be met by using a technology, rather than accepting articles which only describe the awesome capabilities of the new technology and mention application in the concluding paragraph.
(b) Editors and reviewers can monitor the balance of editorial content in their publications and determine the desired balance between model-centric and techno-centric contributions.
(c) Writers of RFQ's and RFP's can spend more time on specifying the learning or performance need and what is known about acceptable instructional models than they do on acceptable hardware/software platforms for bidders to use.
(a) Editors of publications can require a balanced treatment of strengths and limitations, or knowns and unknowns, or costs and benefits, or risks and rewards, when describing a proposed model or solution.
(b) Editors of publications can require that concluding comments give the author's assessment of whether the model or technique described is robust enough yet for professional practice or if more experience/research is needed.
(a) and (b) from issue two, above, could be done for this need, also.
(c) Journals and Societies who commission special-topic issues, and publishers who bring out "handbook" and "review" volumes could commission monographs reviewing a given technique to distinguish recommendations for practice from recommendations for further research leading to practice.
(d) A independent joint standards body (IBSTPI?) could publish a periodic rating of books and articles, including categories such as:
- recognized as a general (minimum?) professional practice
- recognized as an advanced professional practice (suitable for specialized situations, and/or requiring specialized resources)
- recognized as an experimental practice
(a) Major funders and/or consumers of research could sponsor an invited conference to discuss and publish recommendations for a common research agenda for the field and follow up with a coordinated research/support priority-setting initiative or statement of intent/purpose for their entity's activities.
(b) Professional Associations related to the field, together or separately, could sponsor a conference on research priorities and/or a coordinated series of conference activities resulting in a coordinated international publication.
(c) The annual summer faculty gathering hosted at Indiana University could devote its conference to the task one year.
(a) A consortium of major (probably non-competing) corporate development organizations, or an industry group of developers (e.g., in and supplying the military), could define a common object model for TBT or a subset. This could then be used as the basis for interface with existing object-oriented rapid application development (RAD) tools.
(b) We could all recognize the ID2 group for its advances in authoring technologies, regardless of what you think of transaction theory.
(a) a group of professional associations (perhaps an expansion of IBSTPI?) could define product or process standards for custom and off-the-shelf TBT, sell a "good housekeeping seal of approval," and use the proceeds to market the seal to consumer groups.
(b) a few major consumers in an industry could require vendors to be ISO 9000 compliant under Z1.11 simply by using the certification as a qualifying criterion in RFP's.
(c) professional associations related to the field could work with associations of consumers in major markets to define standards for TBT product quality in that field, then use those standards in either strategy (a) or (b) above.
(d) professional associations related to the field could product TBT "success stories" involving good professional practice, then develop a certification process (with IBSTPI?) (involving portfolio assessment?) to identify qualified practitioners.
(a) Someone in a department located in a business school want to take this on?
(b) Can anyone in a major accounting firm study and report on the issues and recommendations to businesses and sources of funding?
(c) The "brand identity" moves above would help establish the intellectual capital of the field as an asset, in the eyes of certain kinds of investors.
(a) set a common research agenda as discussed above.
(b) do a series of case studies of how R&D funding initiatives have led to advances in practice, particularly among commercial developers and corporate consumers of TBT (general thesis: the funding of basic research in ID by the military and NSF from 1960 through 1980 led to creation of what is now a $3 billion TBT industry). Use this to demonstrate the value of funding R&D in the field to the possible funding agencies (and invite invidious comparisons to competing fields which have been unable to show such ROI).
(a) actively encourage strategic partnerships between ID researchers and research institutions needing support, and sophisticated consumers of ID services needing state-of-the-art solutions and able to pay for them (Schank's Institute for the Learning Sciences comes to mind as a model, whether or not you agree with his theories.)
(b) develop three-way partnerships between school systems or states, commercial development & marketing/sales/support organizations, and ID departments to hustle TBT development grants from NSF, DOE, DOL, state workforce development, and welfare reform agencies. Bundle R&D projects into the grants or just use them to support internships, equipment purchases, etc., which in turn can be used for independent research.
You may not like these ideas, and I hope you have better ones. My point in proposing them is only to try to show that it is within the field's reach to take meaningful action on these issues-- if we develop a sense of common purpose and stewardship of the field. If we don't do it, I believe a trend of gradual decline of the field is likely, at the same time that demand for what the field has to offer increases. But, I'm cautiously optimistic that we can act to control our common professional destiny. Why would you want to spend your professional development time on anything less?