Facilitating Access to Digital Records of Practice in Education with Technology

Abstract

Many disciplines are changing their traditional approaches to data, encouraging data producers to share data and enable researchers and practitioners to reuse data to answer new research questions and address educational needs. In response, data repositories have emerged, and the availability of data has increased. Repositories build infrastructure to facilitate data access and provide software tools for reuse. This paper analyzes the reuse of digital records of practice (DROP) in education through the lens of one software tool, Zaption, focusing on DROP reuse by teachers, teacher educators, and individuals involved in professional development activities. Using analytics data from one repository’s Zaption integration from 2012-2016, we found that producers and reusers of DROP preferred an array of rich communication tools over tools that added technical functionalities. The results contribute both to our knowledge of DROP reusers as well as inform repositories about software choices to facilitate reuse.