Educational researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in using digital technologies to facilitate the third space in TE (Youens et al., 2014; Howell et al., 2017; Watters et al., 2018). Therefore, it is crucial to explore the affordances that digital technologies have to support a digital third space that stimulates a collaborative dialogue among teacher educators and pre-service teachers about learning and teaching. 

This study aims to examine the potential of a digital collaborative assessment to generate a third space for professional practice. A digital third space in which boundaries and traditional hierarchies between partners and academic and practical knowledge are blurred. Traditionally these assessment sessions take place in the school classroom during professional practice. An external examiner (usually a university-based teacher educator) attends physically to observe and discuss the pre-service teacher's role and performance in a discussion that includes both the school-based teacher educator and the pre-service teacher. In the digital collaborative assessment, the pre-service teacher prepares, teaches, and records a teaching sequence (45 minutes), later stored and shared with the university-based and school-based teacher educator. The aim is to have the video recording available for all partners to watch and prepare for the assessment session, where key discussions take place about the teaching sequence and the pre-service role and performance as a teacher. 

As these assessment sessions aim to foster collaboration among partners, I intend to see how (and if) the use of videos could potentially enhance this collaboration and provide an arena for more reflective discussions in which the third space emerges. I will look into video recordings of the teaching session of pre-service teachers in training and the assessment conversation that partners later have via Zoom. To explore the digital third space, it is necessary to observe what partners focus on and what knowledge sources they bring into the assessment situation based on the shared experience from practice in the video recording. This is to see what roles partners play and how knowledge types merge in the digital environment. 

The quality of Teacher Education (TE) has been constantly in the spotlight, conveying efforts for innovative ways of preparing future teachers. Over the last decades, educational researchers have emphasized the crucial role that cooperation through partnerships between schools and TE institutions has for professional development (Allen et al., 2013; Broadley et al., 2019; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Korthagen, 2017; Le Cornu, 2010). Hence, school-university partnerships are essential in facilitating practical training that allows detailed reflections and learning from experience in a collaborative environment where knowledge sources integrate into more equitable ways (Zeichner, 2010). 

Professional practice occurs in complex settings where discourses about learning to teach and doing teaching converge. Therefore, cooperation among stakeholders holds greater significance. Over the last decade, the post-colonial concept of the third space (Bhabha, 1994) has gained increased attention in teacher education research. The third space in TE is a metaphor that denotes the hybrid collaboration in which pre-service teachers and teacher educators engage in professional practice. Partnerships that foster the third space are believed to sustain less hierarchical relationships between schools and TE institutions, benefiting prospective teachers' learning process (Zeichner, 2010; Beck, 2018; Chan, 2019). 

However, challenges in the somewhat utopian third space, such as adapting to roles and identities, power relations, and sustainability issues, further jeopardize the finely balanced fabric of partnerships (Martin et al., 2011; Daza et al., 2021). Despite the challenges, educational research explores a promising third space that enables unique opportunities to rethink and reconfigure teacher education. 

The study has a qualitative design, and the context is a TE program at a large university in Norway. The sample is pre-service teachers in the full-and-part-time Practical Pedagogical Education program and their teacher educators (i.e., university teachers and school mentors). The participants in this study are 7 pre-service teachers from the part-time cohort and 5 pre-service teachers (full-time cohort), 5 university-based teacher educators, and 5 school-based teacher educators. Based on the digital collaborative assessment, I conducted 15 video-Stimulated Recall interviews (SRI) with each participant. I select sequences in the video that support reflections and dialogue among the informants (Dempsey, 2010). The video is not the primary subject of the analysis; instead, the focus is on the participants' reflections. I seek to bring participants closer to the assessment session in the video and allow them to listen and look at themselves. The intention is to elicit participants' perceptions of their roles, the knowledge sources they highlight during the assessment session, what aspects of the session they deem more important, and their reflection on using technology to support this process. The analysis is inspired by Brinkman & Kvale's (2015) approach to qualitative interview analysis and will be carried out using various tools such as coding, and categorization of meaning on different levels.

The preliminary findings indicate the potential of using digital technologies in collaborative assessment in TE. Several instances point towards a digital third space where the three partners constructively collaborate on more equal terms. In addition, the use of video recordings fosters a higher degree of reflection among the partners. This is evident when the pre-service teacher is able to see him/herself in the role as a teacher, which can spark a discussion from a meta-perspective relevant both to the theoretical and practical component of their professional practice. However, participants also report challenges regarding using digital tools in the classroom as a source of distraction and the limited fraction of the classroom recorded. Issues connected to privacy (not all students grant consent to be filmed) and conducting the lesson in "unusual" circumstances are other challenges related to the use of technologies. Therefore, their plans might be disrupted, interfering with their concentration and interaction with the group. Despite such challenges, I anticipate that the analysis will refine our understanding of digital and collaborative third space while simultaneously highlighting the importance of reflection for professional development in TE. The implications point out towards a more flexible look into the use of digital technologies that do not only connect us but which also can facilitate interaction, reflection, and the merging of knowledge sources, which have previously been seen as separate learning arenas. These implications are relevant for TE programs in Europe that aim to adopt the third space as a partnership model. A digital third space can facilitate collaboration and contribute to a broader understanding of how to merge the key components of TE (theory and practice) to foster professional development. Furthermore, understanding the affordances and challenges connected with these innovations can contribute to future efforts to implement a digital third space in TE.

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