Boundary crossing in design based research: Lessons learned from tagging didactic metadata

Teachers are coming to take a crucial role in designing the curriculum they teach, relying to varying extents on learning-resources that they gather. The internet, though rich in resources, does not support didactically-sensitive searching. To address this, we are developing a pair of tools, one for tagging didactic aspects of learning resources, and one for searching based on tagged metadata. Employing a design-based-research approach, we search for a set of metadata categories that will support changes in teachers’ practices, yet will be comprehensible to teachers and useful in their current practices. We describe the “boundary” that this research has exposed between the communities of te¬achers and researchers, and the mutual learning that took place through boundary-crossing.