I agree that they are not mutually exclusive. But at the same time they are not dependent either. As a added bonus InfoCard by itself solves a lot of issues. Including registration and use simplicity together with anonymity. OpenID IMHO fails miserably in these cases.

Why the need to choose between paper and computer? Why the need to choose between vi/emacs and IDE? This is all nonsense. First thing is to decide what knowledge is student expected to display. If the sudents needs to display good organizing skill, mental discipline, good memory and expert knowledge of problem domain, by all means push them to paper or vi/emacs. If you want the students to display the knowledge of grammar, whether in natural or synthetic language, then remove the obstacles that require so much more. You might not want to give students an IDE with RAD tools integrated, but any GUI text editor with syntax highlight should do, just like any word processor with spell-and-grammar checker will do for texts.

First step in school of writing is to master the grammar and style. This can only be achieved if the student doesn't have helpers (live or automated) that clean up his/her mistakes. The student must be able to proof-read own texts, spot mistakes and fix them. No need to to this on paper, but it certainly shouldn't be done with F9.

First step in school of programming is to master the grammar and style. This can only be achieved if the student doesn't have helpers (live or automated) that write plumbing code for him/her. The student must be able to read his own code, understand it and write it from first "public class", to the last "}". No need to do this with vi/emacs, as there is not context help, no language reference a single click away, no drop down context menus to insert class member names. However, there should be no magic Alt-Whatever key to create complete class construct all ready for inserting the code into members, let alone some magic RAD builder. These things hurt students, not help them.

Once the students are past the introductionary stage, you can start moulding them. Once you know your natural grammar and style, you can focus on what do you want to write. Once you know synthetic language grammar and constructs, you can focus on whole applications with GUI and all. Just like established columnist writes a column and presses that magic F9 button to catch anything he/she missed, the programmer clicks couple of buttons to write that plumbing that holdes the logic together. But stay away of tools that will do this for you when you don't master those things yet.

One thing is to lecture basics of programming. IDE can be used for all the help in writing the code, but it shouldn't be abused to write code constructs. When the students know how to write these basic construct by themselves, then comes the time to start lecturing the use of IDE and the tools that it provides. Students should obtain complete knowledge from the basics of how to write in plain editor, all the way to knowing the tools that will make them productive when they go out and start doing this for life.

It's similar with algebra. As a student, I had to display knowledge in three areas:

1. theory
   where I had to display the knowledge of axioms and theorems
2. practice
   where I had to display the knowledge of using the theory on short practical tasks
3. and Mathematica (Wolfram Research)
   where I had to display the knowledge of solving large problems in as efficient ways as possible

Catch was that you couldn't take tests 2 and 3, if you failed test 1, and you couldn't take test 3, if you failed test 2. It was simple bullshit filter, that worked perfectly.

Programming is just like that. You should first understand the syntax (statemets, operators, how do they fit together), only then you can start writing short snippets (reading, writing, calculating, sorting, ...), and only after you know this, you can start thinking about writing complete application with GUI (using data binding, database access, designing usable GUI, ...). Each step takes you further to the point of useful knowledge, but you just can't skip any of them. Lecturer just has to decide on the right tools for the right level and don't let the students skip steps that are needed for complete understanding.