There is lots to be excited about when one considers the possibility that multi-media representations of teaching (MRTs) might become wide-spread tools that are part of everyday work in the teaching profession.  Like with almost any technical advance, with a big “upside” comes the possibility that we will use these tools in suboptimal ways or maybe just in silly ones. 

Teaching, first and foremost, is social.  It is most importantly a set of social practices comprised of routines that people use for a highly specialized set of communicative purposes.  So, it is a fair question to ask, “Why have any confidence that MRTs might change things, for the better, in any important way?”.  That said, I think there are three reasons that we can be hopeful about the impact of widespread use of MRTs in teaching.  First, MRTs offer persistent representations of teaching that can be revisited.  Second, in addition to being persistent, MRTs can be annotated.  Third, multiple MRTs can be connected into conceptually meaningful collections. 

Since teaching is largely talk, it is ephemeral.  Of course there can be notes about what transpired in teaching episodes, but the essential reality of teaching occurs in the moment.  MRTs allow persistent representations of teaching that can be revisited on multiple occasions.  This persistence, in, and of itself, can be valuable.  However, persistence can be misused in a number of ways.   On the one hand, we run the risk of using MRTs essentially as playback, rather than discovering novel ways to use MRTs that go beyond rewinding an experience.   Another playback-like risk of MRTs is to treat teaching simply as performance rather than an interaction whose primary focus is learning.  That is, we run the risk of looking at the performance-act rather than trying to understand if, and how, learning is taking place.  Along with persistent representations must come meaningful ways to highlight and analyze.

When various forms of annotation are added to MRT representations, they may become more valuable than, just, presentation objects.  The ability to annotate makes it possible for individuals, and groups of individuals, to comment on teaching and to share their commentary both in the moment and over time.  In this way, MRTs become a kind of history-enriched digital object whose communicative history is available to a professional community.  Bringing persistence and annotation together may start to allow professional teachers to gain real value from MRTs.  However, even these capabilities are not without their risk of folly.  One can easily imagine applications that reduce teaching to checklist annotation rather than meaningful reflection, much as classroom walk-throughs, in some school districts today, are being implemented in ways that are shadows of their original conception. 

Perhaps the biggest potential benefit of MRTs is that there will be digital library collections of them.  We can only hope that there will standards for the creation of MRTs – both technical standards for their creation and pedagogical standards for their membership in collections.  When that happens, it should be possible for local communities of professional teachers, national communities and even international communities to share their practice.  In that world, teachers may be able to create new social arrangements for their profession that determine how to share MRTs of practice and with whom, under what rules. We can only hope that, as we evolve to that place, we resist the tendency among commercial actors to create proprietary representations of teaching, and local and national actors will resist creating barriers that will prevent professional teachers from sharing their practice. 

In my view, the real value of MRTs is that they will become a thing that exists, in between.  They will become conversational props that teachers can use to talk about their work in ways that they cannot talk about their work, now.  The vision that makes the most sense to me is that distance will matter less to teachers as they exercise their practice and that teachers, and those who support them, will see value in creating persistent representations of practice that can be annotated and shared widely.  While there are surely risks, that as a field we will do silly things with this capability, the opportunity is well worth pursuing.