My attraction to multimedia representations of teaching began in the 1980's when many of the people who came to watch me teach a fifth grade mathematics lesson seem to be  puzzled by the same two questions.  Actually, they were not questions, they were assumptions. I start here because of the issues that those assumptions continue to raise for the production and use of multimedia representations of teaching.  The first assumption was that my students had to be "special" because they saw them speaking to one another in relatively civil ways about ideas.  The second assumption was that I was not responsible for covering the curriculum, because my students and I would spend so much time solving and analyzing a single mathematics problem.  Neither of these assumptions was correct, but they were ways for the people who saw a single lesson in my classroom to make sense of what they were seeing.  This led me to wonder if it was possible to use multimedia records to challenge these assumptions.  As a teacher, I knew that I had worked long and hard, and deliberately, to build the kind of classroom culture that people were seeing, beginning on the first day of school and attending to it every minute all along the way.  I also knew that I paid considerable attention to what I was supposed to be covering in fifth grade, and could explain how the problems we were working on served to cover the required curriculum across the year, given the wide diversity of ability among the students in my class.

My wondering about how to represent these "over time" aspects of my teaching intersected with the availability of new technologies--technologies that I perceived to have the potential to represent the complexities of teaching as I saw it from the inside.  In the "Mathematics and Hypermedia Teaching" (MATH) Project, funded by the National Science Foundation from 1989 until 1995, Deborah Ball and I collected daily records to document teaching and learning in our elementary mathematics classrooms.  We catalogued those records and we experimented with how to make them available to people who wanted to understand the teaching we were doing.  One piece of that project that remained undone, though we spent a lot of time thinking and talking about it, was building something that we called "The Investigator's Working Environment" (IWE). We envisioned a multimedia environment in which teachers, intending teachers, and researchers could investigate questions about teaching and learning using what we had collected to document teacher and student work across the year, and teacher educators could build "packages" of multimedia materials for use in courses.  Some of that work has been done in projects that followed on what we did.  But the question of how to use multimedia representations to understand the work of teaching as it extends across the entire year still remains.

My current questions about multimedia representations of teaching come from a different approach to their use.  I have been studying and designing teacher education/professional development programs that purport to help novices to learn teaching in, from, and for practice; i.e. to learn to do teaching, rather than just to analyze it.  What role do multimedia records of novice pratice have in this endeavor? In particular, what are the practical and pedagogical problems associated with collecting multimedia records of novices' efforts to enact the instructional activities that they are taught how to do, cataloguing those records, making them available in a timely manner to both novices and their instructors, and most importantly, figuring out what novices and their instructors ought to be doing with those records to further the learning of teaching?