markusreutermarkusreuter / haferweg 15 / 22769 hamburg

University of Art and Design HelsinkiApplication OfficeHämeentie 135 C

00560 HelsinkiFinland

haferweg 1522769 hamburg

+49.177.4353936

roitsch@gmail.comwww.markus-reuter.com

www.roitsch.info

Dear Sir or Madam,

I would like to apply for the MA program “ePedagogy Design - Visual Knowledge”.

I am presently studying educational science at the University of Hamburg. The focus of my study is the connection of education and creative elements, espacially visuali-satitions with the help of different media (technology).During my last years I accomplished different projects, which all have the ability to combine design, interculturality, and education. My personal motive for my applica-tion is that the University of Arts and Design Helsinki will provide their students with the MA program “ePedagogy design” exactly these three factors. The international MA program would perfectly provide my career to become an educator, who can combine the three elements design, interculturality, and education.

My application, especially my study plan might be very diffrent to other ones you will receive. Within my study plan I want to show you my development chronologically arranged in order to give you the explanation why I became the person I am right now and why I would like to apply for the MA program “ePedagogy Design”.Thank you very much for your consideration.

Sincereley,

Markus Reuter

22 Febraury 2009

curiculumvitae

22 January 1982in Düsseldorf, Germany

Haferweg 1522769 Hamburg+49.177.4353936roitsch@gmail.com

born

adress

mobileemail

experience

University of Hamburg, Project ePUSH http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/zentrale/projects/view/7

Student employee: Public relations, Visualizations and Evaluation

University of HamburgTutor: for the seminar „ePortfolio“

Warner Chappell Music GmbH & Co. Kg Germany http://warnerchappell.com

Administration and Copyright Management

Amnesty International New York, USA http://amnestyusa.org/educate/about/page.do?id=1102103

Volunteer: Projects for the section „Human Rights Education“

Cultural Care, NewYork City, USA http://culturalcare.com

Aupair

Internationale Jugendgemeinschaftsdienste, IJGD http://ijgd.de

Internship: Planing, Realization, and Evaluation of an international Workcamp

Martin Leyer-Pritzkow; Curator http://www.mlpart.com/index_engl.htm

Student employee: Customer Aquisition, Planing & Realization of exhibitions

Catholic Community Service http://dem-leben-dienen.de/

Team leader: Planing, Realization, and Evaluation of different camps

June 08 - Present

Sept 08 - Present

Oct 07 - Present

Nov 05 – April 06

Sept 05 – Sept 06

May 04 - Sept 04

Dec 01 – Jan 03

May 95 – Sept 03

education

Sept 2006 - Present

Sept 03 – June 05

Sept 92 – June 02

University of HamburgStudy of Pedagogy

University of RegensburgStudy of Pedagogy, Pre-diploma

Goethe-Gymnasium DüsseldorfAbitur

skills

LanguageMedia

German (native), English (fluent), French and Spanish (basics)Adobe-Products, Office-Products, CSS, HTML, Final Cut

markusreuter

interesttagcloud

interesttagcloud generated with http://wordle.net

myapplication

The first project I would like to present is the idea behind my application. As you may have noticed

there are several elements which recur throughout the application. These elements shall create a

specific corporate identity. A corporate identity in-

cludes different aspects: corporate design, personal

identity, and corporate communication.

My corporate design is very simple and well struc-

tured. The first element is the speech bubble, which

occurs on every piece of my application. The speech

bubble is a visualisation of communication (of

speech), but simultaneously a medium of communi-

cation itself - it visualises the content of speech via

writing. The beholder reads the writing and thereby

a communication process is created. Communication is a basic element of education. Besides the

speech bubbles I use the same font and colors to create an effect of recognition. In my letter of

motivation you can find two different kinds of (hyper-)links. The first one is a hyperlink in form

of the url (e.g. www.markus-reuter.com), which leads to a certain project or topic you should visit

to attain more information. The other link, in

form of blue underlined expressions refers to

a certain part in my application. The design of

the second link is inspired by the hyperlinks in

the internet. For example letter of motivation

(above) or the link googlemaps, which refers to

a single project in my portfolio.

My personal identity are the three basic ele-

ments design, intercultural aspects, and ed-

cuation, which creates the basis for my aimed

profession. You will recognize that these three elements matter throughout all my projects but also

throughout all the experiences of work I have had (curriculumvitae).

The corporate communication is basically the ap-

plication itself. First is the written sample, second

is the website www.markus-reuter.com which I

designed for the application to simplify the hy-

perlinks within this application. The online ap-

plication is the same as the written one, but em-

beded into a flash document so you can browse

with the ease of visualisation provided by the

internet.

The basic idea was to present some of my skills through the application itself. I used layout

and text editing (Adobe InDesign) to create the written application. With the help of image

editing software (Adobe Photoshop and Il-

lustrator) I embeded the images into the

doucments. Using CSS and HTML I was able

to design the online application. Skills of

visualisation, helped me to commit my ide-

as/thoughts to paper.

My first of all steps was to create a mind

map on my wall to visualise the structure

and concept of my application. The visu-

alisation was the golden thread throughout

my whole process of application.

whyme

Within my study plan I would like to explain my reasons why I am applying for the MA program

“ePedagogy Design” at the University of Arts and Design Helsinki. The task is not just solved by

simplemindedly listing my reasons, I would like to explain why I have been dealing with the topics

of design, interculturality, and education for a long time and why I would like to extend my skills in

dealing with these topics through the MA program.

Since I can remember I was always confronted with the three topics design, interculturality, and

education. It came naturally to me that I became an educator. My grandmother and my mother both

were kindergarden teachers. My father is an trainee teacher at the public utility. My grandfather was

a carpenter and my whole familiy has the aptitude to be called a “do-it-yourself” family, it means

that crafting and creativity is spread throughout my whole family. In my circle of friends most of the

people do some kind of creative work. Many of them are working in an advertising agency, or study-

ing arts and design. It always affected me to socialize with people with creative professions. After I

finished my school leaving exams, I was not quite sure what to do. During my community service, I

had conversations with different people who knew me the best, and they all recommended me to

look for a scope of work where I am dealing with people, because as they told me I had the ability

to be good with people. I came to the idea to study pedagogy at the University of Regensburg.

During my second year at the university I had to make an internship. I decided to lead an interna-

tional work camp. I was fascinated by the combination of intercultural aspects and edcuation. So

I thought about having more experience in that field. I decided to make a break before my pre-

diploma to get some work experience abroad.

During my year in New York City I was an au pair for an US-american family. My main job was to

care for a 10-year old boy. The experience to live within a different culture was unique. Especially

the city itself, New York, had and still has a lasting effect on me. During my time abroad I was able to

work for Amnesty International USA. I volunteered for the Human Rights Education program.

The combination of education and the creative aura of New York inspired me to decide that I wanted

to change the University.

I changed to the University of Hamburg after my pre-diploma in order to study pedagogy within

the new media. The faculty of pedagogy at the University was very interesting for me. The program

ePUSH and the multi media studio are good examples of the usage of new media within education.

Through the seminar “Visual Knowledge Culture” of Torsten Meyer I was asked to accomplish my

own project. I developed the project “GoogleMaps”. The project is still ongoing, but preliminiary

feedback has been exceedingly positive. Torsten Meyer liked the project and asked me to join the

faculty’s mayor project ePUSH, where the faculty wants to help shape the ICT-developments for the

section education.

My first project was “studylog“, where I designed a video for the “knowledge construction tool”.

I started to gain more interest in the topic of new media. Last October I started to run a weblog,

whytaik whyePedagogydesign

“roitsch.info”, where I write on a variety of topics affecting me, such as design, music, or art. And

within my choices of lectures and seminars I centred upon education and new media. For the semi-

nar “Change of Media - Change of Education” I was participating in the work of creating a wiki about

the seminars topic. I joined a group with students of the MA program “ePedagogy Design”, Joni and

Noora. We handled the topic „Central Perspective, book print and beyond“. My own part dealed with

the topic “Google and the Central Perspective”.

In the following semester I got the assignment to develop posters to make ePUSH and its sub-

projects more public. The ePUSH posters were hung up throughout the entire faculty.

Another project was to develop a visualisation of a survey about the students media use. I am cur-

rently designing the surveys visualisation with the help of Ole Koch.

Recently I designed a video for the seminar “Pedagogical Media Theory”. The video “finding an-

swers” is about the development of media which are used to find aswers to certain questions.

As you can see my progression of studying pedagogy in order to become an educator who can

combine the three elements design, interculturality, and education was influenced by many things

throughout many years. I enjoyed every single project and would like to go on with my progression

by attending the MA program “ePedagogy Design - Visual Knowledge” at the University of Arts and

Design Helsinki.

The MA program is the perfect combination of my three basic fields of interest. The international

program is offered to students from all over the world and I would like to make use of the intercul-

turality in order to collect different point of views and different options to deal with educational

problems. The focus on technology and especially new media is a perfect combination to the scien-

tific work of education. In my opionion using technology in education has some great advantages

but also bears a lots of challenges. I would like to join the MA program to learn more about the topic

and gain skills to cope with these challenges.

Within my application you can recognise my personal skills and strenghts. I feel that my streghts

lie with thinking creatively, constructively solving problems and using visualization to generate the

greatest amount of impact. Further, I feel that I am a strong motivated team worker. The ongoing

project surveys visualisation allows me to apply these skills. The project was very well received by

our superiors.

My future plan is to merge design and interculturality into education. In March 2009 I will start an

internship at “mpg Experience Design”. Their scope of work contains developing interactive exhibi-

tions for musems or science centers. I conceive to work in such a scope of work, it would perfectly

combine my personal interests with my profession.

The MA program “ePedagogy Design” would help me to extend my skills and would accompany me

to make my future plan come true.

internationalworkcamp

In summer 2004 I fulfilled my required internship for my pre-diploma. I was in charge of an interna-

tional work camp, where 11 international youths were asked to reconstruct a playground in Berlin.

My internship included the preparation of the camp, the realisation of the work we were assigned

to do, the evaluation of the program and a presentation of the results at a meeting with the joint

service, IJGD.

The preparation began with a training program where I learned a theoretical basis and some practi-

cal tutorials about variant topics as civic education, self-organisation, intercultural or social lear-

ning. I also learned about the legal points of an international work camp and its organisational

processing.

Two weeks before the actual work camp the organisa-

tional and educational preperation had begun. During

the camp in Berlin I needed to handle the realisation,

the supervision of the international youth group as

well as the management of the budget for the whole

group.

The youth group consisted of 11 different people

from around the world.

Our work assignment was to reconstruct an adventure

playground. The adventure playground was based in an underdeveloped neighbourhood of Berlin.

Mostly children came to the playground in order to distract themselves from their situations at

home. The result was that the whole group had an additio-

nal work to accomplish, we needed to care for the children

as well. It was very interesting to see how the whole group

was interacting differently with problems resulted from va-

rieties of the cultural background. Most of the children were

not able to speak English and most of the work camp parti-

cipants didn‘t speak German. But the atmosphere was very

good and we fulfilled our assignment more than satisfying.

The work camp was my first experience with an assignment

I needed to fulfil with a group of people with different cultural backgrounds. We needed to const-

ruct something with the help of different skills and needed to handle the situation that we all have

different cultural relations to most of the things we dealed with.

This experience inspired me to work in an intercultural context of edcuation and I was sure I wanted

to create things which can be received by people.

humanrightseducation

During my year abroad in New York City from September 2005 till September 2006, I was an au pair

for an US-american Family. During that year I had the

most impressive experiences and inspirations I could

have ever imagined. In just a few other cities of the world

the cultural impact is as omnipresent as in New York

City. But not only the cultural variety was a big impres-

sion, also the ubiquitous creativity throughout the city

had a big impact on me. I was sure that when I go back

to Germany I would try to integrate these two elements

much more within my study. I wanted to use creativity to

provide education. I wanted to have contact to different

cultures to use the impressions to extend my options of education methods. At that time I was sure

to change my university to fulfil these ideas.

After a few months I was given the opportunity to use my

spare time for a traineeship at Amnesty International USA. In

the time between November 2005 and April 2006 I worked

for the Human Rights Education program. My responsibili-

ties were conducting research and assisting on administra-

tive matters.

My assignment was to collect information about the US-

american education system. Amnesty International and Joy

Berry, a famous American author of children self-help books,

published a book about the Human Rights for kids, “Mine &

Yours“. Amnesty International had the purpose to constitute

the book as a schoolbook for elementary schools through-

out the USA.

For the integration of the book into the everyday school life

it was necessary to know within which subjects the Human

Rights can be taught. I was asked to find out which subjects were taught throughout one state and

who was responsible for the curriculums in this state. I made a research on the organization of the

state’s education system for the 50 states of America and made contact to the responsible policy

makers.

The involvement in the work of the Human Rights Education program was a great experience for

me. I learned a lot about the US-american education system, and the way how a creative and usefull

product needs to make its way through officialdom to get utilised.

newyork

googlemaps

The seminar “Visual Knowledge Culture” was offered by Torsten Meyer for the summer semester

2008. I visited the seminar enthusiastically because this was one of the first seminars for me, where

we students were allowed to find our own field of attention and were asked to develop our own

project which has connections to the seminar‘s topic.

I was always interested into “Google” and all their products. One session dealed with visual rep-

resentations of our world, “Cartography”. At first

I came up with the idea to embed our faculty

into the “GoogleMaps” system. The background

was to support the student‘s spatial orienta-

tion throughout the campus. At the beginning

of someones study the student needs to find

his way throughout the campus, for example

he needs to find a special building or needs to

know where he can apply for a scholarship. The

idea was realised pretty fast.

More and more ideas came into my mind. I thought about the connection of the virtual world with

the reality. The idea was to embed a “GoogleMaps” marker into real life. A marker made of sturdy

material should be mounted in front of the faculty‘s main

building inorder to arouse the students attention. It is the

same spot as the spot of the digital marker in “Google-

Maps” and it looks the same, so the effect of recognition

is guaranteed.

The project started fictional but the idea gained more and

more interest so that the project became one project of

the faculty‘s mayor project ePUSH.

After I convinced executives of our faculty, who had to de-

cide whether to support the project or not, the project developed to the idea to embed all buildings

of our faculty into the “GoogleMaps” network and to embed “GoogleMaps” marker infront of every

main buidling. Right now, the status of realisation is processing. Torsten Meyer had the idea to in-

corporate the College of Fine Arts of Hamburg. It has to be considered that the markers need to be

mounted very carefully inorder to protect them against vandalism.

A second idea was that theoretically the satellites of “Google” will scan the world one day and the

“real life” marker is scanned by a satellite and will be published by “GoogleMaps”. Then the repre-

sentation of the virtual world in the real world will be represented in the virtual world again.

The project is an attempt to create a cut through the real world by the virtual world and back-

wards.

study.log

“study.log” is a knowledge construction tool, which was developed by employees of the education-

al science faculty of the University of Hamburg. “study.log“ is now also a part of the mayor project

ePUSH. Sebastian Plönges and I were asked to support

the project by taking over the public relations and be-

come the interface between users and developers.

The work included the servicing of the corresponding

web site “www.studylog.de”. Our first task was to cre-

ate a new video which explains the basic ideas and the

object of “study.log”. We taped different kinds of media

which are usually used to collect material, information

or knowledge. Then we presented the advantages of “study.

log” by making screen recordings of the tool in action.

The realisation of the video exacted a big amount of organi-

sational talent. We needed a female narrator, an expert for

voice recording, and someone to compose a musical work

for the background.

The video can be seen at www.vimeo.com/3295835

In January 2009 the first German “BarCamp” with the top-

ic “Design” took place in Cologne. And I went to the

“DesignCamp” in order hold a session about the design

aspects of “study.log”. I focused on the visualisation

aspects of presenting the material in different kinds of

arrangements.

The presentation was followed by a discussion about

the content of the session. The session was taped by

the organiser and streamed online. In this way the pub-

licity effect of the session was very big.

roitsch.info

A weblog is an easy to handle (new) medium for the publisher as well as the for the readers to

present aspects of a life and opinions to specific topics. In my opinion a weblog is a mixture of a

diary and a medium of communication.

My weblog www.roitsch.info started Octo-

ber 2008. I want to collect and share interest-

ing things I met through the internet but also

through my everyday life. Basically I am writing

about anything which matters to me. The catego-

ries are and will not be limited. In my blog I post

about topics like design, visualisations, observa-

tions of daily life, ideas or music. These topics all

have the same effect, they influence me in the way I see things, they represent my interests. Thus

you can say my web blog is a reduced presentation of myself. I want to share my impressions with

the world in order to communicate about these topics.

The strengt h of weblogs is the cultural and social exchange. People read my posts, write comments

or create links to my blog/posts. The interexchange through communication creates new points of

views. These new points of views can lead to new states of mind and create ideas. According to my

opinion ideas are the results of inspiration and

creativity.

These two elements are essential, also within the

scope of education. Thus the weblog influences

me in the way I deal with the topic education.

A weblog can be reached by everybody in the

whole world, consequently there are no cultural

or intellectual borders.

Another strength of the weblog is that within this

medium you can embed different kinds of media, e.g. texts, videos, music, or flash animations. Thus

a personal benefit is that I can use my weblog to publish different projects I accomplished. I can

connect them and present them to people, who are giving me feedback. The feedback helps me

to find ways of improvement. I learn with the help of people from all over the world, with different

cultural backgrounds.

My weblog is a perfect instrument to combine the three essential elements I want to work with:

design/creativity, interculturality, and education.

Map of visitors of my weblog

google&centralperspective

In the summer semester 2008 I attended the seminar “Change of media - Change of educational

settings”, which was open to students from the international master program “ePedagogy Design

– Visual Knowledge Building” as well as to students of educational science from the University of

Hamburg. In this seminar we dealed with different literature which have a focus on media theory. I

joined a group with students from Finland, Joni and Noora. We handled the topic “Central Perspec-

tive, book print and beyond”. It was my first seminar where I worked together in a group with people

I never met for real. We had conversations through emails and “Skype”. It was a very interesting

experience for me.

The assignment was to create a wiki about our

topic. We subdivided the assignment into differ-

ent parts and each of us three developed his/her

own part but with consideration of the others.

I dealed with the supposition that it is often taken

for granted that “Google” is getting a monopoly

of knowledge. And with its project to digitalise

books, “Google” will continue to prove the sup-

position. In the first part of the wiki I explained the process of digitalisation and reported about the

controversies, which occurred recently.

The second part deals with the consequences of the overload of information, offered by the inter-

net, espacially offered by “Google”.

I reported about the changes which developed

with the spreading of the medium internet and

the rise of “Google” to the most used search en-

gine world-wide. Espacially educators have to

deal with the impacts of these changes. Within

my part of the wiki, I discuss the advantages and

disadvantages, which come along with these

changes.

You can find the wiki under this url:

http://wiki.christinaferner.de/doku.php?id=content:central_perspective_book_print:00_overview

In order to read it, please use the login and password from the written application.

epushposters

One of my first assignments at the mayor project ePUSH was to develop an advertising campaign

to make ePUSH and its sub-projects more public throughout our faculty. Sebastian Plönges, Carolin

Seng and I were instructed to handle this assignment.

The idea was to hang up posters with pictures with

unique closeups of our faculty. The posters were labled

with quotes from texts with their focus on media theo-

retical topics. On the one hand we wanted to visualise

the connection to the faculty by showing pictures of it

and on the other hand we needed to embed the topic

we are dealing with in the ePUSH project. For example

we used quotes from the “Horizon Report”, which is a

qualitative research project that seeks to identify and

describe emerging technologies likely to have a large

impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative ex-

pression within learning-focused organizations.

We wanted to use the advantages of “guerilla market-

ing” which use uncommon actions to extend a prod-

ucts publicity. One of our idea was to make different

steps of promotion. The first step included to hang up

posters throughout the whole faculty but with no ref-

erences of where the posters are coming from. Even

in the second step we did not publish on the posters

who was responsible for the campaign. We wanted to

arouse the students attention by showing them the

information on the posters but the missing initiator

should arouse even more curiosity. The posters of the

third step included references to the ePUSH project.

At the best students would then realize the connec-

tion of ePUSH, the faculty, and technologies (espa-

cially new media), which are used within learning en-

viroments.

surveyvisualisation

For the mayor project ePUSH we employees were asked to develop a visualisation for this years

survey about the students media use. Ole Koch and me chose to deal with the assignment.

At first we thought about the main aspects of the survey. In the main focus were the students and

their contact to „new medias“. For example their usage of weblogs, online coummunities, or their

contact to medias within their study. But also technical questions were important, for example what

kind of operating system their are using or what kind of internet connection.

The first work step was to chose the right kind of medium to present the results. That wasn‘t easy be-

cause the survey contains more than 30 questi-

ons. We choose a flash animation which should

be embedded into the faculty‘s web page to

provide a big level of flexibility and to get the

student‘s attention. We had the idea that the

beholder should be animated to interact with

the visualisation. The main content of the eva-

luation is the student himself but we also wan-

ted to show the connection to the university. In

order to combine students, the university and

the results of the survey, we chose an image of the university with the faculty‘s main buildings from

the bird‘s eye perspective. This image is the background of our visualisation. We wanted animated

students to run around the campus and they should present the results themselves. The students

run around in different colors for different kind of questions. For the realisation we taped our mo-

vements from above with a video camera. Then we embedded these movements as an animation

into the animated campus. The result was that the students are running around the campus and

when you scroll over one certain student with your cursor the animated student holds up a sign with

its certain question. When you click onto the

sign or the student, the sign turns around and

shows the results.

The results should not only represent this

years evaluation, but also the change to last

years results. We came up with a new form of

pie chart. The percentage of an answer (e.g.

87% of students are using an internet flat

rate) was represented by the circle‘s area. We

used the advantages of flash animations and brought the circle to widen. The widening shows the

increase or decrease in comparison to last years results. The evaluation was not completed yet, as

well as the animation. The base frame works and the single animations as well but right now we

need to combine all aspects into one flash animation. As soon as the results are evaluated the flash

animation of this years survey will be finished.

findinganswers

For the seminar “Pedagogical Media Theory” in the winter semester 2008 I had to make a multi me-

dia snippet, for example a video. The task was to produce a small multi media snippet explaining a

concept or a term related to a discussed media theory.

With the help of a camera, a screen recording program, Fi-

nal Cut, and some crafting skills I designed a video, which

deals on the one hand with the topic how answers to

certain questions can be found. “Google” is currently the

most used tool (or interface) for this task, thus it plays a

main role in my video. On the other hand the video deals

with my professor Torsten Meyer’s thesis that a medium is

not only seen by its observer, but that the observer is also

seen by the medium.

Torsten Meyer uses Jaques Lacan’s “object petit a” to explain an interface in his lecture “Pedagogi-

cal Media Theory: Interfaces, Media, Education”.

“According to Lacan - in the intersection, between subject and object (whose places are not clari-

fied) originates a screen, an interface [inter-face], between their faces.”1

While I read Torsten Meyer’s interpretation of Lacan afterwards I came to the idea to use this as-

sumption for my video.

“Google” is often critized for their observing methods. I used these assumptions to show how the

search engine chooses the results for you, in an ironical way.

You can see the way the results are found as an assumption of a media theory itself. The medium,

e.g. the internet, could be seen as a space of possibilities. Within my video the man in the “Google’s”

box office could be seen as the mechanism, which chooses the possibilities and presents the results

as search results on your screen, on the interface.

I wanted to show how far search engines, especially “Google”, can/might go and I wanted to show

that the medium internet misleads the users to believe that it is always up to date, and always

shows the truth. That’s why the internet is often the first choice to purchase information. A common

task in school is to find information about a certain topic and many pupils (as teachers) believe, by

“googling” some things and printing the results the task is settled. But the real work just begins:

the information needs to be verified and you need to check the reliability. That’s complicated and

hardly taught, mostly because adults even teachers are overchallenged themselves.

The video can be seen at www.vimeo.com/3058505

1. Original quote: “In der Mitte, zwischen Subjekt und Objekt (deren plätze nicht geklärt sind) entsteht – Lacan zufolge – somit ein »Bild-schirm«, eine

Schnittstelle, ein Inter-face, zwischen den Gesichtern.” Meyer, Torsten: Interfaces, Medien, Bildung. Paradigmen einer pädagogischen Medientheorie, 2002,

S.163