Given my work in teacher education and professional development, I am most interested in the use of multimedia records of practice to support teacher learning.  Such records offer the possibility for both novice and experienced teachers to learn from the practice of others through investigations of classroom teaching and explorations of student work.  At the same time, they are simply another example of the array of representations of practice that are used in professional education, including narrative cases and stories of practice told by practitioner.   What is of particular interest to me is how we begin to map the work of teaching and investigate the features of representations that are most useful in helping others learn to teach. 

Video records of teaching strike me as particularly useful, both in their ability to capture the multiple and overlapping interactions that occur in classrooms; such interactions are often difficult to capture in narrative cases.  In our work on the teaching of practice (see our article to appear in Teachers College Record), we talk about the value of being able to pause a representation or approximation of practice and replay it.  Learning to listen carefully to student thinking is hard work; student comments are often partial, fleeting, and obscure. The ability to watch the same class discussion several times in order to focus on the flow of content and the nature of participation offers a view of practice that is virtually impossible to capture in real time.

My website in the insideteaching.org collection, published by the Quest project at CFAT, documents my use of Yvonne Divans Hutchinson's website in my teacher education class.  Over time, I have begun to supplement this website with videos of some of my graduates.  They provide "near peer" examples of discussion that are much closer to what my students are likely to be able to do in their first year of teaching.   But we know very little about how novice or experienced teacher actually learn from these websites.  Does it matter if the contexts portrayed in the websites match the contexts in which teachers teach or if teachers are at similar developmental levels?  How do we convey both the particularities of teaching as well as the more general principles through multimedia materials?  How do we begin to layer and overlap such materials to develop a richer understanding of core practices?  And while we're at it, how do we identify the core practices of teaching--within and across subject matters--that are worth documenting. 

My fear is that multimedia records will go the way of other innovations in teacher education, including micro-teaching, case methods, portfolios, etc.  Such methods were all the rage for awhile, but most were under-developed theoretically, used idiosyncratically and superficially, and discarded rapidly in favor of the next new thing.