I think the world of MRT’s is about expand to very quickly in ways that will both advance and unsettle the excellent experimental work that has been done over the past ten years. My orientation to MRT’s primarily has been through higher education although I have had exposure to (and admired) K-12 multimedia case studies and case teaching.  As with the rest of this community, I have been attracted to MRT’s as a way to capture the complexity and multidimensionality of teaching. Teaching and learning are such intensively situated phenomena, that it seems almost impossible to imagine their representation for study and knowledge-building without using multimedia as a critical tool. I think this is especially true the more we learn about the role of intermediate thinking processes, emotional intelligence, and the complicated nature of intellectual development.

Within higher education, the potential for the use of MRT”s has barely been tapped, especially in the realm of the scholarship of teaching and learning. And in particular I have observed over the years a singular tension in MRT’s between the impulse to empower regular disciplinary faculty to engage in the documentation of their practice (and student) learning, on the one hand, and the difficulty of making MRT’s that are visually and aurally accessible, intellectually compelling, and educationally persuasive, on the other. The look and feel of a teacher-built site often seems amateurish in ways that overshadow the insight and “wisdom of practice” embodied in the site itself. An unintended consequence of the scholarship of teaching and learning movement has been, in the name of professionalization of practice, to turn teachers into amateur videographers and site designers. This irony will be boosted exponentially in the next couple of years by the explosion of grassroots video (digital video, YouTube) and other online tools that facilitate the manipulation and annotation of video, such as http://viddler.com. We are in the era of the “amateur upload,” which will supercharge the world of MRT’s in all kinds of ways over the next few years.

Beyond Parallel Play: From my perspective, a core issue for a vision of MRT’s is to think of them not merely as tools with which to author and publish representations of practice (and for others to study) but tools whose functionality makes them spaces for thinking, discovery, and invention. Both a challenge and an opportunity is expanding our conception of MRT’s in light of the growing capacity to upload, annotate, tag, and remix information in all kinds of ways. All of these growing features of the so-called interactive Web make it newly possible to imagine MRT”s that are spaces designed for what I call fluid group inquiry. That is, how might we see MRT’s not merely as rich representations of practice (or a gallery of same), but shifting, growing, changing databases of multimedia objects, uploaded by teacher scholars, with various kinds of “tags” that would track their relationships to people, contexts, and ideas. Fluid group inquiry spaces should increasingly have the ability to juxtapose pieces of evidence, artifacts, and reflections in all kinds of new ways. It should be possible in such spaces to “mash up” (i.e. create spontaneous collections of evidence in new ways based on the harvest of particular kinds of embedded data) that would reveal new insights; these mash-ups would themselves be new artifacts, available for others to consider and build on. Fluid group inquiry spaces would be a version of MRT’s where teachers could make, in other words, one big old multimedia mess, but use tagging, searching, sorting, and annotation tools to create many meaningful narratives out of the messiness.

Thinking of MRT’s as fluid developmental spaces (and not merely publishing spaces) has its parallel in what is happening with student electronic portfolios, as they expand to be more than vehicles for students to make samples of finished work public; these next generation of portfolio spaces promise to be more dynamic formative spaces for students to represent their identity and their own learning processes. The next generation of electronic portfolios will themselves be a whole new world of the “amateur upload,” making use of video, audio, even virtual reality environments like Second Life. It is very important that we imagine MRT”s in ways that help us skate to where that puck is headed.