ABSTRACT
There is reason to reexamine the historical foundations of instructional design (ID)despite the existence of two previous thorough and thoughtful histories of the evolution of this part of the field of educational technology, Saettler (1990) and Shrock (1991). It is the thesis of this chapter that the inherent nature of the ID process was determined by its very ancestry. I argue that its genetic endowment gives it an inherent nature, to continue the biological metaphor, that clearly constrains its functional capabilitieswhat it can and cannot do-and its ~bility to metamorphose. A cat cannot do what a spider does, nor can a cat become a spider.
