Implications
Teacher educator’s professional learning needs
This research suggests the needs for a greater focus in teacher educator professional learning experiences relating to the implicit and explicit infusion of media and digital skills, fluencies, competencies and literacies that can be immersed and should be evident within the practices of teaching, learning, and scholarship of teacher educators, particularly when considering shifts toward an open educational practice. While most participants confidently and explicitly shared their awareness of specific MDL when considering audience, text and production of learning materials or scholarly works, there is a need to address growing uncertainties about where or how to enact any MDL or OEPr in teacher education. In this research the participants reveal criticality, creativity, connections, and communicative strategies in their use of media and digital technologies in their teaching, which informs their negotiations within their OEPr. This research provides a view of how a deeper understanding of skills, fluencies, competencies and literacies with MDL can be enacted within a teacher educators’ decisions and designs when teaching, learning, and sharing their research.Program wide open approaches
Second, this research has implications for possible program-wide integration of MDL within an open approach among TEds through collaboration (Lohnes-Watulak et al., 2018), boundary spanning (Nerantzi, 2019), and networked practices (Oddone, 2019) or through open educational policy supports (Bossu & Stagg, 2018; DeWaard & Hoechsmann, 2021). Participants in this research individually demonstrate the application of approaches and technologies incorporated within an OEPr that promote opportunities for students to “develop their knowledge and literacies for working appropriately with copyright and controlling access to their online contributions, while presenting options for extending some of those rights to others” (Paskevicius & Irvine, 2019). By examining two worked examples from faculty of education courses, Stewart et al. (2021) reveal issues of control, bureaucracy and isolation. By modelling and infusing media and digital elements focusing on communication, connectivity, creativity and criticality into course structures and designs, the participants demonstrate to their students and colleagues that academic work has fundamental value beyond the silos of faculty contexts, providing opportunities to engage more widely with learning communities in FoE across the country and/or around the globe (Paskevicius & Irvine, 2019).Research in alternative formats
This research inquiry models the use of a post-intentional phenomenological philosophy and methodology (Kennedy, 2016; Vagle, 2018) in conjunction with an alternative dissertation format while exploring a crystallization approach to the research of teacher educators’ practices. The implication from this research is the potential impact resulting from this shifting nature of the form, function, and purpose of the dissertation in current times. The multimedia format of this dissertation models and reveals the potential for an ALT-DISS production. It is simultaneously process, production and presentation rolled into one interactive and fluidly linked digital document.One challenge in the production and creation of this ALT-DISS format is acknowledging the intentionalities inherent in technology use and how relationships with/through technologies shape the research and the production of this multimodal dissertation. It is this conception of intentionality, as it relates to my researcher relationships as both emitter and receptor, and the participants’ relationships with/through technology, that needs to be recognized and acknowledged. These relationships are complex, complicated, and ever evolving. P-IP research recognizes these intentionalities within the relationships that humans have with the technologies they use, as well as how these technologies shape the relationships humans have with each other (Ihde, 2015; Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015) and with the research productions. One constraint in this research hinges on my inability to share with explicit clarity or transparency, the intentionalities of the participants’ lived experiences within their human↔︎technology↔︎world relationships. The participants reveal, through their lived experiences and shared artifacts their efforts to select and apply technologies with intention in their OEPr. This highlights the importance of cultivating awareness of the “intricacies involved in each technology-mediated interaction” (Hammershaimb, 2018). Their stories stand proxy for the actions and events that encompass their MDL in an OEPr.
I also recognize and acknowledge that intentionality and practice within human↔︎technology↔︎world relationships can be shadowed and opaque, often happening through black-boxed technologies (Kallinikos, 2002; Lloyd, 2019) within password protected spaces such as learning management systems or behind paywalled secure sites where research publications are warehoused. Although opening the dissertation is the goal, as contained on a Scalar instance, it is likewise constrained by digital affordances that are not explicit or revealed. This research, along with Tran’s (2019) research into multimodal and non-traditional dissertation work, reveals that openly shared dissertation documents that set precedence and model the creation of seminal, original, and creative research works should be encouraged and celebrated. This dissertation is just such a document – revealed and shared in the open.