Futures Reflection – Bruce Barker

November 1, 2009

Introduction
I used to be a computer programmer, back in the early 1980’s before there were PCs or Apples,
when one ‘wrote’ programs by punching holes on a stack of cards, waiting for hours for a guy to
feed them to the computer, and then finding out that you had forgotten a semicolon on line 137. I
worked for IBM – writing software to run printers, and then on a Defense Department program to
detect incoming intercontinental nuclear missiles. At times I would chuckle at the fact that the
only class I ever dropped in High School was computer programming, where I was totally lost and
overwhelmed.

After spending eleven years in computer school and industry, I became disenchanted with the
endless meetings, documentation-writing and project cancellations, so I quit and rode my bike
around the world. In the middle of my trip, I taught a semester of Computer Science at the
University of Helsinki in Finland, and loved it! It surprised me that an introvert like me would
thrive on the interaction with students, which was a breath of fresh air for me after all those years
in cubicle world. After my trip I checked into teaching high school computer science, but
discovered that I’d have to go to school for another year and a half and then pay full tuition to
work 70 hours a week for no pay for a half year! I thought: “Wow, this country sure doesn’t
encourage converts from industry to education!” I had too many debts, so I worked for Qwest for a
while until I couldn’t take it anymore. On Friday I was in some mindless specification review; on
Monday morning I was in the University of Colorado School of Education– sitting on the grass,
throwing beanbags around and talking about life.

I went on to teach mathematics for the next twelve years to ‘alternative’ kids in a couple of
alternative high schools, the most recent at Vantage Point High School in the Adams Twelve Five
Star School District north of Denver. Although I have always tried to use the odd program or
gadget here and there in my teaching, I’ve been feeling like a virtual tech illiterate compared to my
former life as a computer geek. I’d looked around enough to notice some interesting technology-
related things happening “out there” in education, so I decided to take a year off of work in order
to learn and integrate some of those cool things into my teaching.

I am doing this exercise – projecting myself and my work life five years into the future – for two
reasons. First, it’s required for my IT6750 class (Current Trends and Issues in Instructional
Technology) in my UC Denver Information and Learning Technologies master’s program that I just
started this semester. Second, it’s important that one regularly looks forward to try to predict
what you will be (and/or want to be) doing in the future; the more you plan for the types of things
you’d like to be involved with, the better able you are to plan which courses and projects to
undertake and which tech tools to learn in order to be ready when the opportunities arise. The
following section is my vision of how my career in education will be evolving in the year 2014. I
have tried to be as realistic as possible, as I know that going overboard in terms of major career
changes or overoptimistic technology advances will not help me focus on what I need to be doing
during this program to prepare for the future.
Future Forecast – My Professional Life Five Years from Now
As I head back to my office from working with Teri – the overworked online learning coordinator
at Horizon H.S., to design a new online Trigonometry class, I think back to my decision six years
ago to go back to school in order to become a little more tech-literate. Now, I’m viewed as bonafide
‘techie’ in my two different but complementary part-time jobs – as an online and math technology
consultant for my district, and as a math teacher/learning coach at my newly-renamed school –
the Alternative Center for Education (A.C.E.). They are my dream dual jobs, as they combine my
interests in new technology with my love of teaching and working with kids. While I could easily
work full-time (or so) as an instructional technologist, I believe that it is important to also practice
what I preach in order to relate to what our teachers, and students, are going through.

Online and Math Technology Consultant

Back in 2009, when I interviewed Julie Bowline, my district’s new Director of Instructional
Technology, she said the district was losing a growing number of students each year to
alternatives such as home-schooling and online learning (Barker, 2009). She and several other
district execs had read Clayton Christensen’s book Disrupting Class, as did I. We all learned that
major disruptive change was coming to public education in the form of student-centric online
learning, and that from 2014 (this year!) to 2020 the percentage of high school courses delivered
online would really take off – increasing from 10% to 50% (Christensen, 2008, p. 98). District
leaders decided that we could either jump into the fray and start offering a variety of e-learning
opportunities to our district’s students, or watch as more and more students and families leave,
taking their per-pupil funding with them.

With this in mind, I realized it would be a good idea to get involved in the design and creation of
online courses; so when our district’s mathematics coordinator told me five years ago how
desperate she was for someone to head up the effort of designing online courses equivalent to our
year 1-3 secondary math curriculum, I volunteered. Since I was one of the first people to learn
how to use the new online system and to customize courses with it, I now find myself in demand
(job security!). My consultant job was originally focused on customizing and improving the online
math courses and helping other high school math teachers incorporate technology into their
teaching; now, I get more and more requests from other content areas for my help with their tech
and online efforts. I have pressure to ditch my teaching/coaching at A.C.E., which I am resisting in
order to stay involved in teaching.

As our district did not have the time or personnel to build a large number of courses from scratch,
we licensed the Odyssey LMS (learning management system) from Compass Learning. It is a very
modular system, so when I’m designing a new course I’m able to: choose which lessons will
comprise the units for the course and in what order; choose which standards will be assessed and
at what points; modify existing lessons and build new ones; and integrate various media (e.g.,
videos, simulations, websites, etc.) into the lessons. It allows a good deal of individualization via
mixing and matching of modules, creating individual learning paths for each student based on
pretests, and including a variety of learning modes for students’ different learning styles. It is a big
step towards Christensen’s vision of “student-centric” online learning, though it is not (yet!) able
to automatically determine students’ dominant intelligences (e.g., Gardner’s eight intelligences)
and tailor the lessons accordingly. Odyssey is a great improvement from the previous CBL
(computer-based learning) systems we had used in our school – Plato and A+. Odyssey 3.0 is due
out in mid-2015, with several new features, such as: integration with a wide variety of
communities of interest and practice, coupled with much richer communication (more natural and
flexible synchronous or asynchronous conversations) and collaboration capabilities utilizing
Google Wave (Grossman, 2009); augmented learning options within lessons which guide students
to web resources for topics that pique their interest during the lesson; and the integration of
several new tools for creating and publishing multi-media projects.

The initial need for these online courses was to institute a “credit recovery” program – for those
students who had failed a core course but need to retake that course to get back on track and/or
graduate on time. Due to our success with this initial focus, the fact that it is web-based, and the
exploding demand for flexible ‘anywhere’ and/or ‘anytime’ learning options, we’ve been
expanding our online course offerings to a wider variety of people in different circumstances,
including:
 Home-bound and home-schooled students
 Expelled students (who can still learn and earn credits while serving their ‘terms’)
 Middle school students who need higher level classes but can’t commute to the High School
 In-school students with scheduling challenges
 For interventions with failing students
 Adult learners and GED preparation courses
 Self-supporting students who need flexibility due to work schedules
 ANY student who wants a course not offered at his/her school, including out-of-district
students
The district programs for these different groups are based at the Alternative Center for Education
(my home school), which I describe in the next section. However, every secondary school in the
district has one fulltime online learning coordinator, who works with students and teachers at that
school to arrange for online classes that fit their needs and interests, and also runs the online lab
where students can work if they choose. I assist these online coordinators

Pros and Cons of Online Learning

When I began my ILT (Instructional Learning and Technology) master’s program at UC Denver
back in August, 2009, I had never taken an online course before, and was a big skeptic. As I
progressed through the program, and studied their pro’s and con’s and the ways in which they
were evolving, I became more and more convinced that they represented the biggest growth area
in education and training. I quickly changed from a skeptic into a proponent and worked to
position myself to be a leader in the online movement within my district.

Besides the obvious advantages of online learning (providing courses not offered in the school or
district, being able to study anywhere at any time), the biggest advantage I see as a teacher is that
students can work at their own pace and level. My biggest frustration has been that my math
students have always been at many different levels, causing me to shoot for the average student,
trying to give the higher students some challenging problems to do on their own, and trying my
best to scaffold in the missing basic math skills that my low-level students never learned due to
their failing math all through school but being “socially promoted” anyway! Online learners only
have to complete the lessons that they need, and they don’t have to sit and wait for the rest of the
students to finish their work, or give up before they’re done because the class is moving on.
Even though I am a proponent for, and deeply involved in the online learning world, I can still see
several advantages with in-person classes. The human interactions are more real (e.g., real-time
discussions within a group or the whole class which include the nuances of the human voice and
body language, students learning from each other as they work through investigations); the ability
to build, feel and examine real physical objects; the ability for teachers to quickly tell how students
are doing, both academically and personally. Parents also argue that students, especially younger
ones, just do not have the maturity or skills necessary to work independently. As Warschauer
(2007) emphasizes, the ability to work autonomously is acquired through a process of instruction
and mentoring by others. We recognize that this is indeed the case, so we have set up an online
center at each school so that students have the option of taking online classes within a structured
school environment, so that they still have access to expert help and classes not amenable to
online (e.g., P.E., woodworking), and they can still participate in the social functions, clubs and
sports that make American schools unique. It is not really an online vs. in-school choice, as the two
are independent.

Mathematics Technology and Knowledge Base

The other side of my consultancy position is to assist secondary math teachers in our district
incorporate technology into their teaching. My ‘services’ include helping to setup and run various
tech gizmos, such as interactive whiteboards, document cameras, math software, and a
networking system for graphing calculators. One of my biggest projects for my ILT Master’s was to
design and build a mathematics data/knowledge base – named ‘CPBase’ for “Core Plus knowledge
Base” – a database of open source math resources, which I and the majority of the district’s math
teachers now utilize on a regular basis in our teaching and tutoring. I help teachers integrate these
resources into their classroom math teaching, and I am also gradually integrating some of them
into our online math course offerings.

The knowledge base has grown since I started work on it in 2010 to include a wide variety of
media, including photos & graphics, videos, screen-cast tutorials, audio and video files, simulations
to help students visualize various objects and processes such as slicing 3D objects (the curriculum
suggested slicing clay cubes, which was a mess and didn’t work), and a growing number of free
applications, such as Winplot – a powerful graphing package, and Google’s Sketchup – for
designing and building a wide array of geometric objects, from simple cubes and prisms to
sophisticated architecture. As John Seely Brown has noted: “the Web is the first medium that
honors the notion of multiple intelligences . . . – abstract, textual, visual, musical, social, and
kinesthetic.” (Brown, 2002) By gathering and utilizing this wide variety of resources in both in-
class and online courses, we are connecting with students who in the past might have been lost by
the predominantly abstract, written language of traditional math classes.

This shared database has enabled more collaboration among the different math departments,
saving an enormous amount of time that teachers had used to search around the net, often
fruitlessly, for a single applet to help illustrate a concept. It continues to grow, with teachers
finding resources on the web or building their own, and submitting them to CPBase along with
some basic user help documentation. I serve as the webmaster to ensure objects meet certain
standards, are tagged appropriately, and that they operate correctly on the different teacher and
student platforms.
Alternative Center for Education – Learning Coach

In Disrupting Class, Christensen states that the monolithic education system can only truly
innovate by developing a common language (e.g., the ideas from his book) and employing the
change tools of power and/or separation (Christensen, 2008). Our district first started employing
online classes to satisfy an urgent need for credit recovery, which was a fairly patchwork process
at first. As they looked at the bigger picture, with the forecasts of 50% online instruction by 2020,
and the growing online needs for students in different situations, they decided that that they
needed a more comprehensive strategy. The superintendent created a power team from around
the district (including myself - due to my recent training, online course experience, and my
background in alternative education) to define and implement the approaches needed to respond
to the changing state of education.

The centerpiece of our framework was to turn our alternative high school (Vantage Point) into the
Alternative Center for Education for our district, in which online learning figures prominently. It is
a focus school which comprises several interrelated and complementary programs:
 Five Star Online Academy – which oversees all course development, staff training, and
student enrollment for online learning, and the running of the satellite online learning labs
at the other district schools.
 Alternative School – for students who don’t fit the mold of the traditional school, due to
their learning styles and/or various personal, familial and social challenges. It is a highly-
structured, contract-based system with both in-class and online courses, including a
number of support classes for developing personal and academic skills.
 Adult Education – works in conjunction with the different cities in the district (Thornton,
Northglenn, Westminster, Brighton, Broomfield) to provide G.E.D. and continuing
education opportunities through classes at the A.C.E. building and the Online Academy
courses.
 Expelled Program – students who have been expelled due to serious legal infractions
would study online in a structured environment within the A.C.E. building.

A.C.E. offers classes between 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday. The later starting time is
based on research that adolescents need 9 to 10 hours of sleep per night and that they learn most
effectively later in the day, especially in the afternoon (Carskadon, 1999). In addition to the online
offerings, ‘home-schooled’ students may use the online labs and tutoring help at A.C.E., attend
classes offered there, and join clubs and sports teams at other district schools. Due to research
that a significant portion of a person’s intellectual capacity is determined in his or her first 36
months, we developed an online mini-course on early childhood development for the alternative
and expelled students (and highly encouraged for all others), so that these students learn what
they can do to give their kids a head start in life – e.g., by talking constantly to their infants at an
adult level (Christensen, 2008).

Each A.C.E. student has an Individualized Learning Plan (ILP). This is a web-based portfolio which
contains information about the student’s interests and hobbies, learning needs and styles,
academic and career goals (with links to college and career exploration and planning tools),
educational records (course results, standards attained with proficiencies, etc.), awards and
recognitions, resume (with educational, work and community involvement experiences), and a
portfolio of their work products. Every staff member at A.C.E. (teachers, directors, secretaries,
etc.) are responsible for a group of students from the time they enter until after they graduate,
making sure that their ILP is up-to-date and they are getting the support they need. I enjoy this
part of my job, as I get to build closer relationships with students. There are no grade
classifications (e.g., 9th , 10th grade, etc.) at A.C.E. They all take courses based on what standards
they’ve achieved and what they still need and want, based on their ILP. When they have
demonstrated proficiency in all their required standards, they may graduate if they’d like, or they
can stay longer to improve certain skills and/or get a free head-start on their college courses.

Because of my strong desire to stay connected to students, I fight to keep my second part-time job
of “learning coach”’ in at least one in-person math class, along with several stints per week as a
coach/tutor/mentor in the A.C.E. online learning labs. Those classes and labs are scheduled every
other day; the other days I either work in-person or at home on projects or issues for other math
teachers and online coordinators. My students know that they are my test subjects for trying out
new tech-based learning methods; they enjoy being guinea pigs, and also enjoy giving me a hard
time when the technology malfunctions! However, due in large part to my training at UC Denver, I
do not try out every new gizmo that comes along; I always try to focus on the learning objectives
and the research behind what methods are most effective for learning. My courses are also
gradually evolving into more of a blended/hybrid style. At the beginning of each course, I have my
students take pretests on the Odyssey system to determine which math skills they struggle with,
and on skill work days each person works on the skills they need on the online system. As we
continue to improve the online math courses, I have used our computer labs and laptop sets on a
more frequent basis.

The technology components in my classroom that I use everyday include a cart with my laptop
connected to an LCD projector displaying onto an interactive whiteboard on which I and the
students interact with the computer, a document camera, and a TI Navigator networking system
which ties together each student’s graphing calculator. I can project any student’s screen,
download programs and data onto their calculators, take quick polls; they can upload anything for
the class to see, and all of them can interact with programs and graphics on my laptop (e.g.,
plotting points on a coordinate grid to play “Cartesian Battleship”, or “Green Globs” by using
equations to shoot down objects in the graph. I find that, especially with my ‘alternative’ students,
periodic games are a very effective way to motivate them; they get really pumped up for some of
them (like Math Jeopardy for reviewing content) and don’t realize they’re doing a lot of math!
Every day’s lesson is structured around a Powerpoint presentation which contains links to a
variety of resources such as graphics, animations and videos contained in ‘my’ CPBase. I also have
a small set of computers around the room for pair work or quick web queries where we don’t need
a full lab.

My work life has changed dramatically since I made that decision in 2009 to learn about how the
use of technology might improve my math teaching. Due to that decision and the projects I chose
to pursue during my master’s program, I got the chance to be a key participant in our school
district’s effort to develop a comprehensive strategy to utilize technological advances and a
variety of innovative learning opportunities to adapt and thrive amidst the growing, disruptive
transformations happening in K-12 education. I have positioned myself to be in the middle of the
action of the rapidly-growing online learning scene, while still being able to work closely with
students as a teacher, coach and mentor. Now I wonder what I’ll be doing five years from now?
Reflecting Thoughts

This exercise was extremely valuable, for the reasons I mentioned in the Introduction – to help
me better plan my course of study in my master’s program, but also to look more deeply into
many of the diverse views in the field, and at the trends that experts in the field feel are coming to
public education. Through a combination of my research (especially the findings and predictions
in Christensen’s Disrupting Class), the talks I’ve had with leaders in my school district, and the
process of hypothesizing what exactly will be taking place in my professional world, it has helped
me clarify where I should be concentrating my efforts during this program and beyond. For
example, while I was having some second thoughts about how much work the online math course
design work for my district would be, I now realize that it will be an extremely valuable
experience, and should also expand my options when I return to the district. Also, when I was
looking for information about an online ILP, I found some impressive examples already
implemented, including a state-wide ILP system in Kentucky; now I’m asking myself why our
district or state hasn’t done likewise! Lastly, after fleshing out my ideas for the Alternative Center
of Education, I’ve convinced myself that it’s a solid concept, and am considering sharing it with Ms.
Bowline, our Director of Technology. When I first started thinking about this paper, I felt the urge
to develop a very futuristic vision; however, I’m glad that I stuck to a more realistic path, as it has
helped solidify my plans for the coming year (or so).

References
Barker, B. (2009). Interview of Julie Bowline, Director of Instructional Technology and Library
Services – Adams 12 Five Star School District. From IDTrends Web site:
http://4771158176778170556-a-1802744773732722657-s-
sites.googlegroups.com/site/idtrends/Home/practitioner-profile-
1/PP.Barker.Bowline.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7crZnwcD_cHEl5WPBvza91hc0oknFt-
wYIb3DMmNrxb6xxlUBIXVCcah69bK3oxvyS4ENRY_tll6GtxgqTpon617hDDUCQh7ZSeQx6v7N
4kP25Z5TQhalMkDnqvVSoUAjrfP6SbKL1Qq1CQ1SH6_b7CDsgnL7wz_TVqLU5zB29yB03qQ4P
c7bzH_lDbTuy1lkz3xhviHytFstRLF3VNTOyM5RFIUN0ZXITKonhXBagKP9H-
NUMuxSV_vPpSWlSvZtW7jBBjM&attredirects=0

Brown, J. S. (2002). Growing up digital. Change, March/April, 2000, pp. 10-20.

Carskadon, Mary A. (1999). When worlds collide: Adolescent need for sleep versus societal
demands. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(5), 348-353. (ERIC Journal No. EJ579410)

Christensen, C., Horn, M. B., & Johnson, C. W. (2008). Disrupting Class: How Distruptive Innovation
Will Change the Way the World Learns. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Grossman, L. (2009). Google Wave: What’s all the fuss about? Retrieved October 28, 2009, from
Time Web site: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1929231,00.html

Warschauer, M. (2007). The paradoxical future of digital learning. Learn Inq, doi:10.1007/s11519-
007-0001-5