When I think of the distinctive features of a comprehensive MRT, I think of Joe Schwab's four commonplaces of education: teacher, student, subject-matter and context.  That can be paraphrased as teaching, learning, subject and setting.  At its best, an MRT should include

information and/or representations that communicate essential stuff in each of those four categories.  An MRT should answer the question Who is teaching What to Whom in what Setting? I would add two more desiderata. What do the interactive processes of teaching and learning look (and sound) like? And What is the purpose of the teaching?

I'll write some comments now about two of these categories, and add additional stuff later.

Teacher: Who is the teacher?  What is his or her background?  How did they become a teacher and why?  What is their conception or vision of teaching?  I know that this sort of thing is normally missing in MRTs, but I find that some of the foundation's most popular MRTs, like that of Yvonne Divans Hutchinson and Elizabeth Sharkey include substantial accounts by the teachers of their autobiographies as they relate to the teaching represented on the sites.  The reason I think this is important is that really engaging with a site takes time, energy and persistence.  They are not "quick reads."  Therefore, there has to be something about the teacher whose work is represented that will lead the user to be motivated to get to know this teacher and his work quite well.

Teaching: How does the teaching begin and end?  What are the interactions?  What is the teacher thinking and feeling?  What are the teacher's goals?  Is this best represented visually or through prose? 

Context: Our colleague Louis Gomez constantly reminds me that rarely communicate enough about the contexts of teaching.  They are nested: the class within the school within the district within the community. Although it is normally prose instead of video, including as much about these nested settings is important.  Also, there is a curricular setting which accounts for the continuities of instruction over time, what transpired earlier and will happen later. 

I have two nightmares, one I learned from Pam Grossman and the other from Judy Shulman.  From Pam I learned that teaching well with MRTs is both quite difficult to do well and quite time-consuming.  Many teacher educators and professional developers will need to learn to teach with

these new tools, much like law professors needed to learn  a case-dialogue pedagogy, and will need to have the patience to forego coverage for the greater depth (of certain kinds) that MRTs afford. Will they?  Or will MRTs be set aside to tough to learn and too time consuming?

From Judy, I learned that just because one can prepare a multimedia representation doesn't mean that a uni-media one wouldn't be just as good if not better (and far less time-consuming or difficult to use). So another nightmare is that we will inappropriately try to make everything multimedia and lose the power of old-fashioned prose, narrative accounts of teaching, learning, contexts, purposes, motives, etc. 

Lee S. Shulman, President

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching