The Bridging Research & Practice project is now ended.

BR&P, led by Ricardo Nemirovsky and David Carraher, created a set of multimedia articles about the teaching and learning of mathematics in grades K-12-- articles which include video footage from classroom episodes at schools in Michigan and Massachusetts and which can be viewed in a web browser or on CD-ROM. Participants in other institutions developed additional multimedia articles using video footage from their own research. Researchers at TERC worked with the Math Forum at Drexel University and Michigan State University to study how diverse members of virtual communities, such as teachers, researchers, and policy makers, interact with and discuss multimedia articles.

BR&P also developed VideoPaper Builder software, and released version 1.0 and 2.0. VideoPaper Builder is a software environment to create videopapers, that is, multimedia documents which link and synchronize video, text, and slides. It has been designed for users without technical expertise. The resulting videopapers are linked web pages that can be examined with a regular web-browser, such as Internet Explorer or Safari; they can be published in CD-ROM or posted on the internet.

Videopaper Builder 3.0 is now available for free download from vpb.concord.org. Thank you to our collaborators, the Seeing Math Telecommunications Project at the Concord Consortium.

Our purpose in developing videopaper technology is to create an alternative genre for the production, use, and dissemination of educational research. In a videopaper, classroom or interview filmed episodes can be not only displayed but synchronized with interpretations, transcriptions, closed captions, images of student work, clarifying diagrams, and many more pieces of information that expand the events portraying their full complexity. We conjecture that teachers, researchers and other communities interested in education could use videopapers to make their conversations more grounded in actual events, more insightful, and more resistant to oversimplifications.

Creating a new research genre, however, is not a technical matter. As the history of literature shows, new genres emerge from within social and cultural dynamics and not from isolated individual ideas. Only in practice we will all find what matters for the creation of a good videopaper and how it becomes owned by different communities. Working through the filter of historical time and social use, seminal examples will emerge and lasting approaches will become established. We hope that the VideoPaper Builder will facilitate a widespread and renewed experimentation with ways of doing and using educational research that are more consonant with the needs and possibilities of our time.

The work reported in this web site was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant #9805289).
The opinions presented are those of the authors, and may not reflect those of the funding agency.