I admit that I have been lurking during the exchanges which have been occurring with regard to Ian Hart's paper. I have been following the dialogue rather closely. I whole-heartedly agree with Lloyd Rieber's [21 Mar 97] comment...
I feel the best outcome of good research is not the results based on a certain methodology, but a greater clarity and understanding of what the question ought to be and the generation of a few good other questions.
In fact such an observation underscores Ian's emphasis regarding the strength of qualitative research within the field of educational/instructional technology.
I myself am embarking on research which will focus on the step of learner analysis which must occur either explicitly or implicitly in any ESD or ISD model. The research question I will be posing is: "In this new era of web-based instruction, when posting instruction to the web, invariably that instruction can be accessed by learners on a global scale. When designing distributed, web-based instruction, a designer loses the freedom of circumscribing the target learner population to a single region, country, or even continent. The target learner population he/she must analyze is, in fact, the global learner. The question is then, who is this global learner? What are his/her common characteristics?"
Clearly any attempt to approach this with the goal of obtaining definite answers to this question using quantitative research would be futile (if anyone disagrees, I would definitely welcome a proposed methodology for such a quantitative study). Rather, I intend research of a qualitative nature with the goal of increasing the sophistication of the question itself. By replacing the thesis question with a series of more defined questions that adds more depth to the understanding of the original question.
I propose that when standing on the edge of a new educational frontier, much sweat and energy must go into qualitatively understanding the very questions we are asking before we can hope to begin to search for definite quantitative answers.