I'm not sure if the conversation on Telecommunications is still going on, but now that the semester is over I'd like to comment on one of Betty Collis' questions: If telecommunications is an educational technology, then what does it mean to be a professional in this domain?
It seems to me that instructional technologists are reactive in the sense that the hardware/software techies make all the R&D and marketing decisions and we respond to what they give us. Take the Web technology as an example. We all know that it has wonderful potentials for educational uses, but it is controlled by people who don't think the way myself or others I know in IT think. The search engines bear little if any resemblance to library search mechanisms, HTML is intimidating as are graphic formats, and file/site naming protocols are a complete bafflement.
Perhaps I'm being idealistic, but I think that to truly professionalize our field means that we need to assert our design requirements in such a way that we become co-developers in the technology.