MRTs can contribute to the improvement of teaching in various ways.  What excites me most are their ability to travel, connect different educators with similar needs, and improve practice virtually anywhere.  I see a particular need that could be met in developing nations.  UN Millennium goals call for universal primary (and soon, secondary ) schooling.  But many nations' abilities to educate rapidly increasing numbers of school-age children have surpassed their abilities to quickly prepare teachers.  MRT's could provide concrete, context-specific models of successful practice that could travel wherever they are requested.

MRTs can connect successful practitioners with those who are learning and those are struggling in productive, substantive ways.  As the work of the Quest project showed, novice teachers can learn directly from as well as glean unexpected knowledge and practices from the multimedia representations of experienced teachers.  Not only did novices (and other viewers) borrow obvious lesson plans, they learned from bulletin boards in the background and took hints from videotaped, background conversations that were not highlighted.  It is because MRTs are multi-sensory, fairly complete views of teaching that can embrace several versions of successfu practice,  that they hold special promise for connecting experienced educators with others.

That said, capturing, sharing, and exchanging MRTs for global use (or even local use) would not be easy.  In order for this to yield expected benefits,  we must develop explicit, adaptable frameworks for creating portable forms and learning from MRTs, and accessible technologies must travel with them.  The frameworks should include instructions on capturing practice, connecting practice to curriculum, and reflecting on what is captured.  The technologies need to enable all teachers to capture their practice, to find relevant practices, to comment and re-cycle what they learn. 

The ease with which a teacher can do this is key.  I thus fear the demise of this genre when the tools reside only with researchers and experts and the frameworks become too specific.  Teachers and faculty thus should be guided on how to develop a compact, MRT that is

* specific

* context rich

* reflective

* focused on student learning

* connected to a larger framework (curriculum mandate or professional imperative).

How teachers and faculty find these items and learn from them remains challenging.  Again, frameworks for learning and adapting need to be made explicit.  Inside Teaching offers a step toward creating frameworks for learning from MRTs.  The Perspectives portion of the site describes the steps made to help novices learn from the MRTs of experienced teachers.  This is a move in the right direction for helping people learn from MRTs.  The site does not offer a quick, downloadable shell that someone can adapt, but it does provide lenses for viewing and learning from MRTs.