Many of us have been passionately working on MRT and related fields because, too often, invisible knowledge of effective practice (and of turning ineffective one into effective one) remains in isolated and closed domains, rarely shared across classrooms and various other boundaries.  While I am excited about what we all have accomplished both individually and collectively, my fear for the future of this import work is that what we believe “now visible knowledge and practice” will still remain in isolated and closed domains, unused, thus it will not contribute to substantial educational improvement on a large scale.

So what are the problems and obstacles?  What do we need to consider and further delve into?  I think MRT is still in its infant stage, and it needs to be a lot more meaningful, easy, engaging, fun, and rewarding to create and use MRT.

One of the most important accomplishments we have made at the Carnegie Knowledge Media Lab through our work on the KEEP Toolkit (http://www.cfkeep.org) is that we, indeed, have made the intellectual process of creating MTR engaging and fun (this is what many educators we have worked with have told us).  We have also learned that this process can be supported by technology in a way that minimizes technical complexity and maximizes teachers’ cognitive ability to select, organize, reflect on, and “contextualize” various processes, outcomes, and evidence of teaching and learning, as well as effectively represent their pedagogical experience and knowledge.

Yet, what we have been able to unpack and make visible by taking advantage of technology is just the tip of the iceberg.  For example, as we know, videotaping classroom practice does make teaching and learning “visible,” but it still takes certain expertise, experience, and “points of view” to make the visible understandable and useful. So, we also have to think about how technology could help teachers gain the necessary skills and knowledge (ideally in a “just-in-time” fashion) in doing this work more successfully.

We also know that there are so many aspects of teaching and learning that a video camera cannot capture.  The good news is that there are emerging tools and methods for information visualization, data mining, and knowledge management available to us.  These tools and methods enable us to create much richer representations of teaching and learning, which could be easy to understand and use for all teachers, faculty, teacher educators, and faculty developers.

In order to promote effective use of MRT, I think there are at least two distinctive approaches.  The first one I would call the “course menu” (or supply-push) style, which is to embed MRT in carefully designed instructional sequences and activities for teachers to learn particular skills and practical know-how most efficiently.  Another approach may be called the “buffet” (or demand-pull) style, which is for an individual teacher or a group of teachers to explore a MRT knowledge-base/repository to find an optimal solution to resolve a particular challenge(s) in a local context.

While much more work needs to be done to continue to advance the first approach, I imagine, for the next ten years, the second approach has a lot of potential to contribute to the sustainable future of MRT given the exponential growth of Web 2.0, “open and remix” culture, social and semantic networking, as proven by the success of Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon.com, Facebook, MySpace, etc. over the past several years.