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The improvement of algebra education must be grounded in sound theory of how students develop algebraic reasoning and acquire domain knowledge and skills; and in the beliefs and existing practices of teachers.

Education researchers, university educators, and classroom teachers are increasingly relying on video data for building case histories, documenting instructional practices, providing new insights into cognitive development, and building new curricula.

The use of video and other related data—images of student work, transcripts of dialogue, test scores, observational notes, etc. —allows for the exploration of new areas of inquiry by bringing multiple forms of evidence to bear on important research questions.

However, the expanding role of video and other multimedia data in modern scholarship and teaching brings with it new acquisition, management, analysis, and dissemination challenges for individuals and teams working in this area.

WCER researcher Christopher Thorn and colleagues are creating new research-based materials for high-impact professional development, teacher educator training, and instruction.

Thorn's project, Digital Insight, will provide participating research teams with access to large-scale online storage with an integrated multimedia catalog system based on a recently released set of standards developed by the U.S. Library of Congress.

The scale of this commitment will allow projects to bring extremely large collections online—a feat that would be difficult for any individual research team to accomplish. In addition, developers at WCER and TalkBank are building multi-user video, text, and image analysis tools that will allow distributed teams to perform all aspects of the research and dissemination process.

Among the goals of the Digital Insight team are to:

1. Provide direct support to research and dissemination projects engaged in teacher education and professional development
2. Develop, test, and disseminate open-source tools for analysis of multimedia data
3. Develop and deliver a new collection management environment that enables collaboration at a distance.

For more information, contact Christopher Thorn, at cthorn@wcer.wisc.edu .