I've had a strong interest in the power of multimedia representations for learning and teaching since I started studying child language development and mother-infant interaction in homes with other researchers at Oxford in Bruner's group in the mid-1970's. While the video technologies have changed tremendously from the Sony Portapack tape reels and cameras of those days, the social practices for developing scientific knowledge or 'generative gems' from the wisdom of practice from video records have not evolved apace. 

Substantial insights about learning, teaching, and distributed cognition, among other human activities, have been built up from careful, time-demanding multi-disciplinary analyses of video-recordings of human activities in their social and material contexts using such practices as interaction analysis (e.g., Jordan & Henderson, 1995 provide an excellent history and synthesis of the state of the art at that time; a detailed compendium providing synoptic views of the uses of video in research from diverse theoretical perspectives is available in Goldman, Pea, Barron & Derry, 2007). I've also found exciting the Carnegie work in surrounding teachers with the support to create multimedia records of their teaching that others might learn from, and with each new iteration, the opening up of the models for how teachers can engage in this novel practice are providing important flexibilities that are lessons for all of us.

Nothing in either the empirical work of scientists studying video or in the practices of researchers, teacher developers, or companies producing video for learning by teachers suggests this is easy or straightforward. Everyone quickly becomes aware how much they could use the help of others, and how many different "lenses" for viewing records of practice they might productively use. To use a phrase Louis Gomez coined with his Bellcore colleagues years ago, video provides great "conversational props" - but establishing the generative structures and functions for those conversations is a great design challenge.

What these observations suggest to me is the importance of catalyzing the collaborative practices of analyzing and creating multimedia records of teaching, and of the importance of partnerships (and affiliated respectful struggles) among representatives of different disciplines of inquiry to make the highest quality work in this space. This is one reason I am drawn to the idea of consortia, networks, and other assemblies of interest and expertise, as a way to advance the field(s) concerned with MRTs.

I've also argued that here is a fundamental need for the learning sciences (including studies of teaching)—like genomics, environmental sciences, and other science disciplines— to build a cumulative knowledge base from primary data records for use by many research groups (Pea, 1999, 2006). We work in far too isolated a manner today. In our DIVER project, we've created a web browser platform and software services to support groups in selecting and annotating specific moments of video, mashing them together, and having video conversations about what we call these 'dives' into videorecords.  We've also developed a desktop version of DIVER affiliated with uses of a high-resolution panoramic video camera and software that enable 'virtual videography' after events have transpired where infinitely many movies (and affiliated interpretations) can be crafted through the video event space. 

In terms of technologies to support this collective enterprise, we can sketch out as a group many productive directions that have been developed, and how they are making complementary contributions.  Some of these are open and others are commercial offerings, with tradeoffs that will be important to discuss. We learned a great deal from developing the Teachscape platform and web-based video cases of teaching and learning since the first designs I contributed to in its founding years from 1999-2001. Mark Atkinson and Louis Gomez provide a good account of some of those lessons in their statements.  At the same time, careful ethnographic and experimental studies of teacher learning alone and in groups of different designs from such resources as these and other approaches to video cases are still too rare. We don't know enough about how MRTs work when they work and why. In the text comprehension research field, we have extensive accounts of how to analyze and represent text structure, depth of text processing, reader comprehension strategies and the like - but in what we might call the video comprehension field, we have very minimal research foundations, particularly relating to the complex and emergent practices of multimedia records of teaching.

In the MRT tool world, there is no existing solution design space that our field has together crafted, nor the flexibility that the present generation of modular technologies (Web 2.0, AJAX, etc.) makes possible to customize a technological workbench for a specific set of needs - for researchers, for teacher educators, or for teachers themselves.  We have a central need for the flexible socio-technical infrastructures that will enable open digital video collaboratories for doing the work ahead.

One of the components of such socio-technical infrastructure that we will need to work hard to develop is a common language for what we are referring to as we characterize the properties of MRTs - both as they are intended in their crafting by authors and in how they are experienced by their users (when these parties are different), and for what dimensions of critical appraisal we are utilizing to assess their values  (and their limitations). Otherwise our researchers, educators, and media makers will talk past one another in that place of parallel play and egocentric speech that Vygotsky creates such images of in his book on Thought and Language - whereas we should be multimediating a shared understanding and repertoire of productive cultural practices using MRTs to advance teacher learning, and the success of all the children in their charge.

- Roy Pea, Stanford University

References

Goldman, R., Pea, R. D., Barron, B. & Derry, S. (2007). (Eds.). Video research in the learning sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(1), 39-103.

Pea, R. D. (1999). New media communication forums for improving education research and practice. In E. C. Lagemann & L. S. Shulman (Eds.), Issues in education research: problems and possibilities (pp. 336-370). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Pea, R. D. (2006). Video-as-data and digital video manipulation techniques for transforming learning sciences research, education and other cultural practices. In J. Weiss, J. Nolan & P. Trifonas (Eds.), International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments (pp. 1321-1393).  Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing.

Pea, R., Mills, M., Rosen, J., Dauber, K., Effelsberg, W., & Hoffert. E. (2004, Jan-March). The DIVER™ Project: Interactive Digital Video Repurposing. IEEE Multimedia, 11(1), 54-61.