I foresee a future where teachers routinely create MRTs in service of their ongoing professional development, and perhaps the development and pre-service education of others in communities of learners.  I view MRTs for this purpose in the same way professional athletes might view “game tape” – as an opportunity to watch and critically reflect on one’s own practice, or to improve one’s “game” by watching others. 

I have been examining how teachers might use MRTs for learning primarily through my work on an online professional development tool called Knowledge Networks On the Web (KNOW).  The guiding design principle behind KNOW is making community knowledge about practice explicit and easily shared.  What makes this possible in KNOW is that the entire system is built around a shared instructional object – curriculum materials.  KNOW serves as a direct extension to printed curricula, leveraging experienced teachers’ knowledge and ideas in order to create an ever-expanding resource about how to use those materials effectively.  In this way KNOW differs from sites that are focused around instructional ideas or concepts, but require the teacher/user to make a translation from the representation to their own classroom context.  Ideally, the users of KNOW share some of the key attributes of a community of practice: shared tasks, common problems, expertise that is distributed across members, and a pathway that allows for movement from novice towards expertise, and back again, depending on the specific nature of the task or challenge at hand.  The “stuff” of the community’s work is MRTs, in the form of classroom videos, student work artifacts, and text-based elaborations on the common curriculum materials.

One of the challenges to creating an environment like KNOW is generating the MRT materials.  In the beginning, we accomplished this by working with individual teachers with a range of experiences with particular curriculum materials (those developed by the hi-ce group at Michigan for the LeTUS project with Detroit and Chicago).  We videotaped teacher lesson enactments, gathered and scanned student work, and recorded teacher reflections about their practice as represented in the videos.  Our goal was to create short-form video and have multiple videos for individual lessons or components of lessons, as opposed to lengthy cases about any one teacher’s enactment of the curriculum.  The idea was to have multiple representations so that someone who was using the system for inspiration or preparation to teach could find an example to which they could relate, either in terms of the physical characteristics of the classroom or something about the depicted teacher’s approach.  In practice this was a resource-intensive challenge for our own team, presenting difficulties in terms of identifying appropriate lessons for recording and coordinating with teachers about when to be present.  We fell short of our original goal of having multiple representations for different lessons, and KNOW as it currently exists contains more text-based elaborations on lessons than video-based elaborations (but of course text is one of the media included in MRT).  I discussed the limitations inherent in the current realization of KNOW in some depth in a chapter that appeared in the recent Video Research in the Learning Sciences volume, edited by Goldman, Pea, Barron, and Derry.  Below I present an idea that was at the center of that chapter, and that is one response to the logistical and resource challenges of creating MRTs.

I have always imagined a video capture system that would make it straightforward for teachers to gather video of their own classroom, without requiring the participation of outside videographers or others.  The core of the idea is a “TiVo for teaching,” or a system that, like a digital video recorder, is always recording, but leaves it up to the user whether or not to keep what is recorded.  This places control of the video in the hands of the teacher, so that if they prefer that a particular classroom session be erased, they need do nothing.  However, if a teacher would like to preserve a particular instructional episode for later review or sharing, they need only push one button to save the video for later processing.  Saved video could then be reviewed at the teacher’s convenience for editing, or perhaps for sending to remote research or professional development partners who could prepare it for sharing according to some pre-defined set of rules and agreements.  Such a system would allow for the rapid building of MRT libraries.  A system like this is now possible with the expansion of digital video capture devices, cheap digital storage media, and broadband networks (though such technologies are still rare in most school contexts).

There are multiple potential challenges to such as system.  For instance, I think we have a long way to go in terms of helping people “learn how to look,” just as athletes, to return to my opening metaphor, need to develop expertise in watching game tape in order to use it to improve their play or even know what they are looking for.  But I think the biggest potential nightmare from a system like this is related to privacy.  I recently read an article in EdWeek that highlighted the new problem of students secretly recording in the classroom using their cell phones, and then posting embarrassing or out-of-context video of teachers on YouTube.  There are also issues related to student privacy.  The thought that video from the classroom could be used either to discipline or shame teachers or students is a strong deterrent to any video recording system.  Issues of ownership and control (similar to DRM issues for movies and music) would need to be worked out in detail, with strong technological and social safeguards to control access.  But the hard legal, technical, and culture work needed to overcome these challenges is, in my opinion, well worth the effort.