Biography

Marc lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he work at the University of Michigan Medical School as a technologist and instructional multimedia designer. He works on a team with web designers, programmers, and graphic artists that collaborate with faculty and other educator content experts to create educational software for medical students. He helped designed various learning tools, mainly based around the topics of Cardiology and Health & Nutrition including a module that teaches the art of heart auscultation, that is, the sounds our hearts make, how to listen to them properly, and how to interpret what one hears. Other projects He has built include training for rapid interpretation of ECG heart tracings, how to work with patients for behavior change (smoking cessation and losing weight), and other such subjects.

Marc currently works as part of a global group of educators exploring virtual online worlds such as Second Life, and examining how these synthetic worlds might be used in education. He has played online games basically since they have existed, from the early text-based games (waaaaaay back in 1992) to today’s very popular World of Warcraft and Second Life. He has been a ‘resident’ of Second Life for over four years, so he has a large knowledge base there and has become a bit of a ‘guru’ as the University of Michigan becomes more involved in Second Life. U of M Medical School recently opened a virtual campus within Second Life, “Wolverine” island - named for the school mascot, where weekly virtual brownbag gatherings are held and the island has also hosted classes, some that meet not only in “reality”, but also have begun exploring some e-learning courses strictly within Second Life, with people meeting in virtual space without the need to meet in a single classroom (in fact most of us are in different physical places when we meet for the brownbags). One part of this project is that Marc gives orientation workshops that are a ‘boot camp’ to help newbies (new users) get over Second Life’s steep learning curve. So far over 250 University faculty members, staff, and students have attended his boot camp workshops. He also works with individual faculty members, taking them on virtual safaris to explore these worlds, experiment with how virtual environments are created, observe how people interact in virtual space, et cetera, all to try to spark ideas from the faculty member for projects they would like to explore in this way. In October 2008, Marc ran a second-year medical student elective course called 'Virtual First-Responder' which used Second Life and other virtual reality systems to help medical students train in mass casualty triage skills.

Marc is a bachelor, and spends all-together way too much time in front of a computer monitor. Fully aware of this, he likes to get exercise by taking walks around town. Ann Arbor is surrounded by wooded nature parks and is in general a very green city. He takes mini-trek almost every weekend, typically walking 5-7 mile loops from home off into the woods and along the river and then back by a different route. He is experimenting with video-blogging and take pictures of interesting stuff along the way. He also started geocaching in August, and have managed to find 27 caches hidden around Ann Arbor and elsewhere so far!

He has been taking music lessons casually since November 2007 and is finally starting to 'get it'. Learning to read musical notation has been hard, but the reward of being able to play any piece of music from the sheet is a powerful motivator. He plays piano and keyboards, ocarina, and guitar to a lessor or greater degree. His instructor is the very cool jazz musician Paul Vornhagen of the Cuban Jazz band Tumboa Bravo.

Reflection on Computer Specialization at the University of Phoenix

Marc is finishing the final few weeks of coursework for a Master of Arts in Education concentrating in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in computer education (MAED/CI-CE) from the University of Phoenix. He expects to graduate in January 2009. Phoenix has offered Marc the information and scaffolding he needed to enable him to take his knowledge base to a higher level. Marc is different from most students in this degree program. The majority of his classmates are K-12 teachers who are working on the degree to learn more about technology integration for their classroom. Marc has approached this degree from the opposite angle. While his classmates are teachers learning more about technology, Marc is a technologist taking the degree to learn more about the process of how people learn and how it applies to his specialty as a designer. The online degree offered through the University of Phoenix had the advantage over attending the U of M because of the flexibility offered in being able to attend class any where there is Internet access and any time that is convenient. While this asynchronous model works very well, there were times Marc wished for a means of meeting up with members of his learning team but none were offered through the University of Phoenix. Adobe Connect offered that option, and his long-time learning team used it extensively for group work. Marc highly recommends the University of Phoenix look into Adobe Connect as an optional tool for learning teams and others to collaborate in real time. Marc feels that his coursework has helped him to grow in knowledge and has truly opened his eyes to how the tools and knowledge he possesses as an artist and multimedia designer can be applied to the process of creating educational materials. He has already seen direct evidence of his success in recent efforts, and is proud to soon be a graduate of the University of Phoenix.

On the Process of Developing this Website For CMP560

Marc used Adobe Creative Suite CS3 to create this website. The design process included the use of both Dreamweaver for all of the site layout and webpage creation, as well as Photoshop to design all of the original graphics, the navigation bar graphics, and the banners. The site has been tested on a wide range of web browsers and operating systems (Macintosh OSX, iPhone, Linux, Windows XP and Vista) and has been found by Marc to be satisfactory in it's presentation on each, if a bit different in appearance due to non-standard implementation of CCS in a particular browser owned by a certain uncaring mega-corporation. Marc also used ConceptDraw Pro to lay out the flowchart for the site, and Curio to create some of the content in the Instructional Design section. All original photos and video were shot using a Casio Exilim EX-S880 digital camera. This website was made on a Macintosh computer.
No significant challenges were encountered with the mechanical aspects of the design process while creating this website. Webpage creation and upload went smoothly, without a hitch. The primary challenge Marc faced was in correlating the requirements of the assignment which were written more for the perspective of K-12 classroom teacher to content that would be relevant to his own position as a multimedia designer for a university medical school. Relevant content was identified, gathered and tabulated into appropriate page divisions. The use of a website flowchart assisted Marc in assuring that 'all the bases were covered' when it came time to produce the actual webpages, with this in mind the flowchart was followed fairly strictly. A secondary challenge came from a lack of time and energy to concentrate on producing the Web 2.0 section of the website. As stated in the video posted there, Marc wishes to "do this page justice" and feels that a significant amount of reflection on this page is still necessary before he begins to flesh it out.

Here is a link to this essay in APA paper format as a PDF file.

A Reflection On The Nature of Learning

In the following essay I would like to explore my thoughts and opinions on the learning process and the effect it has on the individual that it produces.

While thinking about the topic of the nature of humans at birth, I had to do some soul searching. While my first tendencies would be to say I believe people are born innately ‘good’, after really thinking about this question and relating it back to readings and my own experience, I’ll say that people are born with neutral tendencies, each of us a tabula rosa, and it is society’s impression built up over time that produces ‘good’ or ‘bad’ actions from individuals. It is through personality built up learning from others that some people reach for the stars while others wallow in the gutter. To me, a person is always greater than the sum of their parts. There is something extra that drives healthy individuals to aspire to continually better themselves and to better the world around them.
I believe that each person has the innate ability to affect their own environment, and it is only through ignorance or past psychic damage that one chooses ‘bad’ over ‘good’. However I feel that healthy, full-informed people will make choices for ‘good’, whatever their society has told them ‘good’ is.
Genetics play a complicated role in our development. Humans are the result to varying degrees of both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, each of us is variably affected by one or the other for each of our myriad traits. Each is a unique combination of traits, the result of their genes, upbringing, education, and socialization. It is society’s job, the parents, teachers and other caregivers, to shape the growing individual into a useful role.
In the distant past, when our ancestors were out hunting for dinner and encountered a saber-toothed tiger, it was good to have a ‘fight or flight’ response built in to our genetics. It meant the difference between life and death. Today, those same responses are a detriment, when instead of a predator it is your boss asking why the monthly TPS reports are late again. I believe part of being human is trying to find ways to mitigate our automatic responses so that we can direct our energies back into society in purposeful, meaningful ways.
I believe the most important component in production of the individual psyche is the environment around that person as they grow to maturity. Unfortunately the world is not a perfect place, and the physical and social environments individuals are brought up in vary greatly.
Socioeconomic status and ethnicity play extremely important roles in development. It is an unfortunate fact that resources are not even across all of society, and those individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are at a distinct disadvantage from birth. People in lower socioeconomic settings have more of a chance of detrimental environmental effects. Poorer nutrition, high crime rates, peer pressure, more financial problems, and bad role models often lead those who feel trapped to risk bad choices as ‘the only way to get by’ or hoping for a chance to escape. It is a shame that the areas where these problems are most prevalent often receive the least amount of effort from the greater society to assist them. That said, people in the middle and higher socioeconomic brackets have their own unique problems to be overcome as well.
Since our environment, for example in the form of nutritional needs, can effect the expression of our genetics, poor environment in the formational years can forever affect the abilities of the future individual. It is unfortunate that some people are not given the same opportunities as others. On the other hand, if a person is dedicated and makes the correct choices and takes the correct actions, then I believe any situation can be overcome. One sometimes has to make one’s own opportunities.
Different cultures around the world have various levels of technology, varying economic abilities, and endless cultural variation for what is considered a ‘good’ member of society. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe it is the society that shapes the individual’s beliefs. Each culture around the world will instill it’s own belief system upon its people. It is not my place to judge the worth of any given society, rather I would celebrate the variety of all that results.
Technology has always played a part in our education and thus in making us who we are. From the earliest cuneiform writing right up to today’s super computers and high-speed digital fiber-optic Internet, they are all just tools. With the advent of our modern age, and the ever-faster acceleration in our level of technology, it plays an ever-increasing role. Here again socioeconomic status comes into play. If one has never had the opportunity to use and learn these technologies, how can they be expected to compete for jobs that require these skills? It takes an especially dedicated individual to have the initiative to overcome the hurdles and to better themselves through getting the education they need. Maybe some day our technology will give us the ability to directly download knowledge into our minds, as Neo experiences in The Matrix. Install the right software and “I know Kung-fu”, but even then integrating that new knowledge will mean learning to use it in the context of the society around us.
As I see it, learning is the process of integrating new information into who we are. How we learn evolves as we grow and mature. At birth, our cognitive processes are not yet developed. For the first years of life we respond mainly through conditioned and automatic emotional responses, which are hard-wired into us. Development is partly physical in nature, so that as we mature, our brains develop the cognitive ability to handle more advanced situations. When a person is cognitively capable of handling more advanced developmental situations, society advances them along the educational path. In modern society we have the educational system codified and refined so that a child is expected to steadily advance along this graded progression and result in a productive member of society when they graduate. Given the varied results, I think it can be agreed that it will never be that simple. I see learning more as an extremely individual, gradual process of exploration and integration as one slowly learns life’s lessons. Our society’s regimented system works for most of the people most of the time. Perhaps if individual differences could be better assessed and addressed, we would see more people reaching their goals, and a richer, fuller integration into society by more individuals.
Who is responsible for directing our integration into society? I believe that ultimately, we are each of us responsible for our own learning and development as human beings. This is of course depended upon our stage in life, and how much cognitive ability we have to ultimately take those reins. When a child is born, its well-being is the responsibility of its parents and the health-care workers that shepherd it into life. The early years of the child’s development fall squarely in the hands of its parents and family, who must begin the education and socialization processes. As the child develops some cognitive ability and reaches school age, they begin to be more integrated into the greater society around them. At this point the child’s teachers and peers also must assume some of the responsibility for the child’s development. This is not to say the family’s responsibility is lessened, but rather it is additive. The teachers and peers become additional influences on the child’s development. Eventually the person is old enough to join the work force, at which point their new coworkers assume some responsibility, though by this point the individual is expected to have developed social skills appropriate for their roles. In the end, it is the choices we make as individuals that result in the conditions we live with. We must learn to integrate into society, to each find our own place where we can be happy and prosper.

Recent Publications and Other Academic Media

Poster presentation at Campus Technology 2009 The Virtual First Responder: Exploring Virtual Reality in the Context of Medical Education. (Stephens & Chapman, 2009)

Wolverine Island (Anderson & Stephens, 2008) was published in the September/October 2008 edition of the EDUCAUSE Review. Available online here. Anderson, P., & Stephens, M. (2008). Wolverine Island. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(5). Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/WolverineIsland/47233.

Contact Information

Marc can be contacted by email at marque (at) umich (dot) edu or through the Learning Resource Center at the University of Michigan Medical School.